Sex, robbery and murder before the coffee
Francis King
SYMPOSIUM by Muriel Spark Constable, 111.95, pp.192 The 'Symposium' which provides the title of Muriel Spark's new short novel is a dinner-party given by a middle-aged American painter and the rich Australian widow with whom he lives in 'a union of great convenience and contentment'. It is taking place, in the present tense, in the first chapter, and it draws to its far from tranquil close, again in the present tense, in the last. The filling to this sandwich is a feather-light, piquant mousse made up of the incidents in the lives of hosts and guests previous to their all sitting down at table together. These incidents are recounted in the past tense.
Like Ivy Compton-Burnett's, Muriel Spark's fiction is always full of dramatic and even melodramatic happenings. The occasion for these is often sex or money, but sometimes what can only be described as demonic possession. In realistic terms, many of the dramatic and even melo- dramatic happenings in Symposium are so dottily improbable that they might have emerged from a feverish nightmare of Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendel, only to be rejected as unusable.
Take, for example, the young and ex- tremely attractive American, Luke. Hav- ing graduated from Rutgers University, he is doing a postgraduate course at London University. He has a grant for this purpose, but to make his spending money he works as a waiter in restaurants and private houses several evenings each week. Luke is the protégé of bisexual, bronze-faced Ernst, a European Community financier who spends most of his time in Brussels, and his wife Ella, who works in London. Both Luke and Ella are infatuated with him. When they observe that he is wearing a Pathek Philippe watch, 'worth many thousands', they assume that it is a present from a gentleman friend. Luke does not attempt to disabuse them of this notion, since, in fact, both the watch and, later, a Porsche car have been bought with money earned by reporting to a gang of thieves the names of the guests who will be present at the next dinner-party at which he will be working.
Since such a guest-list would rarely be available to a hired waiter and since, when
the rich go out to dinner, they can usually rely on servants, au pairs, porters and/or burglar-alarms to safeguard their property, it is unlikely that, in real life, Luke would earn more than a very occasional £50 or £100 for a tip-off. He would certainly not be netting the thousands and thousands needed to buy watch and car.
Even more improbable are the doings of red-haired, prominent-toothed, phe- nomenally attractive Margaret Murchie, and her uncle Magnus, resident of a mental hospital which he is apparently able to use as a hostel, coming and going at will. Magnus is both Margaret's mentor and her accomplice in crime. Having been involved as a schoolgirl in mysterious and sinister happenings — the death by drowning of a fellow pupil, the disappearance of a mis- tress — Margaret, now an adult, is sus- pected not merely by the police but by her own family of complicity in the murder of her rich grandmother. Just before her death, this grandmother has been per- suaded to rewrite her will, so that of her children the only beneficiary is now her son, Margaret's father. The murder, there- fore, takes place to prevent her from rewriting her will yet again.
The next murder in which Margaret is involved occurs when she has become a member of a weird order of nuns. Younger writers tend to regurgitate the work of other writers; older writers the work of themselves. Here, Miss Spark shows her- self no exception to this rule. There were eccentric and worldly nuns in The Abbess of Crewe, and there are eccentric and worldly nuns here.
Sister Marrow, out of the emery paper of whose generally abrasive conversation four-letter words stick out like pins, is engaged in painting a mural in the refec- tory, depicting the scene at the St Peters- burg railway station when, on 16 April. 1917, Lenin arrived from Switzerland. Sister Lorne, a chain-smoker and married to a farm-hand, is also belligerently Marx- ist in her views, so that she looks forward to the day — already surely past? — when 'Our young will pour into the Eastern European countries pleading asylum from the capitalist-consumer system.' Sister Rooke works as a plumber, even attending to the antique drains of the Bishop of London. It is Sister Rooke's assistant, the attractive and much-loved Sister Rose, pining for the spiritual life nowhere avail- able in the convent, who is found strangled but not raped or in any way sexually assaulted in the courtyard of the building.
This brief novel is crammed with such lurid happenings. As they tumble out one after another, like familiar toys from an overstuffed cupboard, one realises that,
although Miss Spark knows a great deal about the ambiguities of good and evil, she is extraordinarily innocent about the mechanics of crime and detection. When things simply do not add up in a novel of this kind, there is of course always at least one admiring critic on hand to employ the word 'metaphysical'. Similarly, when a novel of this kind is full of obvious lacunae, there is always at least one admiring critic on hand to use the word 'elliptical' as a commendation. But one wonders whether to wander about in a cloud of unknowing is ipso facto a metaphysical experience for the reader, and whether frequent lacunae represent what was deliberately omitted or what was never there in the first place.
The very real joy of Symposium lies firstly in its demure but razor-sharp wit and secondly in the effervescence of the style in which that wit finds expression. 'I'm bound to put my muddy boots on the vast soft carpet of her character'; 'she looked like a mild sunset'; 'Nivea cream is my Proust's madeleine': there is scarcely a page that does not yield up some such small gem.
Miss Spark also once again demonstrates her miraculous ability to summon up one three-dimensional character after another in merely a paragraph, a sentence or a brief scrap of dialogue.
In short, not great literature, but great fun.
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