Symposium Author:Muriel Spark Perhaps a London dinner party is as close as our age comes to the ancient Greek ideal of a symposium, and a dinner party given by Chris and Hurley is always prized -- bright, convivial, smoothly orchestrated. Lord and Lady Suzy are full of news of their recent robbery. The Untzingers are taking their separate interests in handsome Lu... more »ke, the graduate student serving dinner. Everyone is curious about the newly married Damiens, who met buying grapefruit. The pheasant is cooked to perfection. The Bordeaux is superb. Of course, at a dinner party arranged by Muriel Spark nothing is quite what it seems and evil is real, covered by the thinnest veneer of civilization. Only one guest, expected late, does not arrive -- but she is being murdered.
Syposium is a high comedy as only Muriel Spark can write it -- witty, precise, and illuminated by moral inquiry. From the young woman who strangely attracts violent death to delightfully mad Uncle Magnus to the hilarious Sisters of Good Hope, the cast of characters is as dazzling as any Muriel Spark has ever assembled. And as they move through the ingenious plot at dizzying speed, we are once agauin in the hands of a master stylist. At once shrewdly funny and profoundly serious, this is the work of a great writer at the peak of her remarkable powers.« less