I Didn't Know Muriel Spark Was Gay....

                

I just finished reading Spark's novel Symposium (1991).

It's an absorbing read, but not a great novel. It comes too close to the conventions of genre (crime) fiction, and the novelist simply doesn't really show that much artistry or interest in tooling sentences or thoughts that are more than workaday prose. These sentences do not impart strange torques to the mind, nor cause displacements in the mainframe of existence the way great literature can do.

It keeps the interest, but there's no elegance, no profundity, and the work leaves none of that troublous residue with which great art invariably burdens one.

I had an intuition that she was working through personal familial situations in this novel, and after reading her online biography (see Wiki) I can see how Symposium was most likely a roman a clef.

Although Spark was clearly a citizen of the world, I was impressed with how much she asserted the Scottish component of her identity here. She valorizes traits she perceives as part of Scottish character, but some of these qualities are distinctly renegade or even miscreant tendencies. She seems to connect Scottishness with a certain cold shrewdness (or does this vicariously through some of the darker characters in this novel--often evil characters with whom the novelist clearly demonstrates empathy).

References to the great Scottish novelists of old are a fairly recurrent feature, and show Spark was very conscious of herself as belonging to a Scottish tradition of literature. There are references to Macbeth also. And the use of many very bloodchilling lines of old Scottish poetry (often curses, or lines celebrating murder) is a rather effective element of the book.

I think she was trying to deploy a Tolstoyan panoply of society in this work, and trying to create a novel which elegantly peels back the skin on society, to show how merciless and cunning covert class warfare can be. Iris Murdoch can do this very well in her novels. Spark fails at this, because she uses too many conventions of the crime novel in moving her narrative along.

Spark's complicated relationship to Roman Catholicism manifests in a few darkly humorous chapters about a house of Marxist nuns which one of the main characters joins for a while. Spark seems to hint that her real interest in the Catholic Church was a secular one, and that she was interested only in works, and not ideology or spirituality per se. Those chapters reminded me of the writing of novelist and poet Fanny Howe somewhat in their desire to retool theology towards the practical and practicable.

What I enjoyed most about the novel was Spark's wry sense of humor, because she can be funny and perceptive about the disparity between people's apparent motives (the things they tell themselves) and their actual motives. That's one area where she excels as a novelist.

The end of this work is particularly artless. Spark throws a sop of morality out to her more conservative readers at the end of the book by using the old deus ex machina. Heck, it's not even one god. Several little ones intervene to reveal the villians to the slightly less villainous, that they might be ruined. The novelist shows a disappointing lack of nerve, and she strains credulity past the breaking point with what one murderess exclaims at the end of the novel. It goes from well-reasoned if over-manicured writing to the ludicrous and cartoonish. It becomes a soap opera.

I've only read one other novel by Spark, but after reading her biography I am curious to see how some of the earlier novels read. I suspect she might have been fully empowered many decades before this novel was written. She seems to have had dalliances with numerous demons in her life. It's a shame that biography can't make it to print due to legal complications. That's something I'd love to read.