Chapter One of Symposium by Muriel Spark, with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith

There are certain books that haunt you. Sometimes the ghost that does the haunting is the author – a voice that lingers in the mind well after the final page, a voice inviting you back for further discussion, a voice that asks, are you quite sure you understand what I’ve said? Sometimes the ghost is a character, some literary creation so real and insistent as to remain a presence in the mind, like one of those people met and then half forgotten, elusive and embarrassing because you may not be able to remember the circumstances of the meeting, or even the name. Symposium, the nineteenth novel in Muriel Spark’s masterly oeuvre, may be less well known than some of her other works of fiction, but it has a powerful capacity to haunt. I first read it some years ago, having picked it up by chance – its modest, somewhat academic title, even though carefully chosen, perhaps attracts less attention than that of her other books. I gave it a second reading after a short interval, and then returned to it once more when I was asked to say something about it here. I know that I shall go back to it at some point and I imagine that I shall enjoy it as much, perhaps even more, than on first discovery. Allan Massie has made a similar point about Spark’s first novel, The Comforters. Sixty years after his first reading of that he has said that he gets as much pleasure from the book as he did when he first encountered it in his youth. That is not unusual. Spark’s books haunt.Symposium was first published in 1990. By that point, the author’s reputation was established. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the book that had brought her to the attention of a wide reading public, was nearly 30 years behind her, and her restless life’s itinerary – Scotland, Africa, England, America, Italy – had provided more than enough material for her fiction: she was in no danger of running out of experiences. Authors, like everybody else, do different things at different stages of their lives. The early battle is to make one’s voice heard for the first time. That done, the task is to tell the stories that, for whatever reason, one feels simply have to be told. Then comes the point when one might allow oneself to be playful. If an author is a magpie, as Spark undoubtedly was, there will be no shortage of ideas, or of scenes, that one simply wants the chance to get down on paper for their sheer gorgeousness. Symposium seems to me to be a novel of that stage in the author’s life. It is a serious book – as Spark’s novels always are – but it is also a book that involves the setting off of a brilliant display of fireworks: something best done in the evening, whether of a day or of a life. A later book may also nod in the direction of earlier works. There will be themes, and indeed characters, that have appeared earlier on in the author’s career. Symposium has elements in it that may be encountered in earlier Spark novels – the criminal gang, for example, bears some resemblance to the murderers in Memento Mori – and it also embodies projects that the author herself identified at an earlier stage as being ones that she would like to address. Spark wanted for some time to write about the fey side of Celtic Britain. In the character of Margaret Murchie, and, to an extent, in that of her uncle, Magnus, we see the expression of an interest she long had in writing about the romantic Scotland of Border ballads. And Border ballads crop up in this novel, their raw, often dark poetry a perfect accompaniment to Margaret’s wild and dangerous doings. Fate and destiny are important in such ballads; we know that what is going to happen is not good, but we know, too, that there is not much that we are going to be able to do about it. Destiny, and its unavoidability, are prominent themes in Symposium, and occasionally we glimpse the inevitability of affairs through the author’s sudden disclosure of what lies ahead. We see at the dinner party the manservants gliding about in the background, serving the pheasant, pouring the wine like well-programmed automata. A fork is dropped when a guest deliberately touches the hand of the young man proffering a dish, but that is a momentary disturbance and only serves to underline the balletic nature of the scene. It is a testament to Spark’s immense skill as a novelist that a tiny event can create such a ripple effect. Little details – asides even – arrest the reader, echo long afterwards. - Alexander McCall Smith