One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party,
enjoying the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is) and waiting for the
imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been
unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this
very moment
Symposium was applauded by Time magazine for the sinister elegance
of Muriel Spark's medium of light but lethal comedy. Mixed in are a
Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by
a rent-a-butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman (a classic
sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror) who has married rich Hilda's
son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod's.
There is also spiritual conversationand the Bordeaux is superb. The
prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and
all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being
thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives .No living
writer handles the tension between formality of expression and
subversiveness of thought more elegantly. (The Independent on Sunday).