Symposium

"Yes, it’s a book where actions and words, the things people do and say, have consequences. So there’s that level. It’s a real juggernaut of a title for Muriel to choose. Normally she chooses catch phrases and familiar phrases… maybe she felt there was a certain irony in calling it Symposium , but you can’t not give it a nod to Plato’s Symposium. It’s also the only other of her novels – the first being The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – that’s at least partly set in Scotland. It features a madman, Magnus. This is another aspect of her that’s not remarked on. She was very sympathetic towards, and very straight-forward about, people with dementia, as she was in Memento Mori . And here she gives a starring role to a man who’s not certifiably sane. When I met her, she’d just written Symposium , so we could talk about it quite a lot. She asked what I thought, and I said ‘I like it very much, but is it probable that someone like Magnus would be allowed out from a ‘bin’ – as she called it – ‘to advise the family on how they should run their affairs? Does that kind of thing happen?’ And she said, ‘oh, it does in St Andrews.’ She was convinced that these things had happened, and of course for a novel to happen you only need one instance of the thing, it doesn’t need to be a phenomenon. If it could happen to one person, it’s worth writing a novel about. It’s got a lovely feel to it, wonderful phrases and sayings. It was her nineteenth novel, written when she was about 72."