Hilda's Last Supper
GOODMAN, WALTER
Hilda's Last Supper Symposium By Muriel Spark Houghton Mifflin. 192 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman "They will constitute an interesting cocktail," remarks the American painter...
...No, the butler, Charterhouse, a recent acquisition from the Top-One School of Butlers, didn't quite do it...
...The producer, avid for symbolism, asks whether it is a dragon...
...A good time for adrink, for a snack, for reading Symposium...
...Not exactly...
...That pretty well seals Hilda Damien's fate...
...Droll lines are tossed off effortlessly...
...It must be said at once that Spark, deservedly remembered for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is above murder mysteries...
...Itis Chris, too, who says of the Charismatic Revival of the 1970s, "I can't admire a religion that causes upset and embarrasses people...
...When she says she is tired of being the passive carrier of disaster and feels it is time for her actively to perpetrate evil, hereplies, "The wish alone is evil...
...Rape," he says, "it feels like rape...
...Whatever the reader makes of such matters—I confess I cannot make much of them and it does not seem to me that Spark cares a lot one way or the other— the adroit interweaving of the book's mild and flaming eccentrics keeps the novel bright and funny...
...Ernst is sure Ella gave Luke that Patek Philippe and Ella is sure it was a gift from Ernst...
...Be careful," she warned him, "those grapefruits look a little bruised...
...Discovering that his house has been burgled while he slept, 50-year-old Lord Suzy sits down on the stairs with his head in his hands...
...Of course, the half-naked bearded figure in a loin cloth who is touching Lenin turns out to be not God but Karl Marx...
...asks the determinedly searching producer...
...He's very good at a dinner party, "says Chris of one of her guests, "you can put him next toatreeandhewilltalktoit...
...That begins a delicious exchange...
...They agree that Margaret has the evil eye...
...Is she actually implicated in the drowning of a schoolmate under her very eyes...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman "They will constitute an interesting cocktail," remarks the American painter Hurley Reed of the dinner guests he and his live-in friend, grand looking and rich Chris Donovan, have assembled in their Islington house...
...Yougive them haloes, then...
...When the documentary is shown, the Observer's television critic gets it all wrong and reports that the mural depicts Anna Karenina at the railway station...
...For no reason I can explain, I found myself nodding in agreement with the comment of the chef that "Five o'clock is always the best time for everybody and everything...
...Simultaneous interpreters have nervous problems," says the wife of a bigwig of the European Community...
...Since the pair and their guests are the main ingredients of Muriel Spark's new novel, his comment may be taken as a book review as well...
...In a particularly winning example, a documentary television producer on a visit to Margaret's ex-convent, populated by fervent Communists given to four-letter words, is shown a sketch for a mural—a sort of monster blowing smoke...
...But even before this record gets around, Hilda worries that Margaret has married William for the money he will get when Hilda expires, possibly with a little help from Margaret...
...the strangling of her grandmother by a Scottish maniac...
...inquires a member of the camera crew...
...Plans for this dinner party of wealthy Londoners, and the party itself, bring together the characters and events in a light, smartly served, agreeably odd concoction...
...These are not fall-offyour-chair gags, but if you get in the spirit, they keep you smiling...
...Perhaps the intended theme is expressed most directly in a conversation between Margaret and her intermittently mad uncle Magnus...
...the killing of well-liked Sister Rose, a member of Margaret's former order of nuns...
...No, it is a train...
...I wouldn't know...
...Spark doesn't try too hard in this, her 19th novel, to dig very deeply into her characters...
...Early on she tells right out that Hilda meets her death as the dinner party is under way, and later she explains who did it (in an aside that seems to be reassuring readers that we are all grown up here and do not require synthetic titillation), without resort to deductive devices...
...But what about the Porsche...
...The book's epigraphs, from Plato and Lucian, signal some deeper intention than delivering diverting talk from engaging characters...
...Are the figures saints...
...The central figure is young, beautiful, red-haired Margaret Damien, n?e Murchie, lately married to William Damien, only son of the fabulously rich Australian newspaper tycoon Hilda Damien...
...No, they are comrades greeting Lenin on his arrival in St...
...the vanishing of a schoolmistress with whom she was having lunch...
...The book begins with a robbery, in which the burglars leave a Bacon untouched on the wall, and ends with one directed at a Monet...
...The artist mutters, "Those are fur hats, you silly cow...
...that would be like using a steak knife on a souffl...
...Yet her eye and ear are as discerning as ever, andshehas a knack of getting humor from her creations without turning them into caricature...
...Margaret, it gradually appears, has a way of attracting violent deaths and suspicious disappearances...
...His leggy 22-year-old third wife comforts him: "Does it...
...He didsomething, however, in cahoots with Luke, the good looking helper who stimulates the affections of both his sometime employers, Ernst and Ella Untzinger...
...And, remember, Hurley Reed, our host, is himself an artist, who would like to paint Margaret if only she would takeoff her clothes...
...Isn't it suspicious, after all, that Margaret should have picked up William in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer's on Oxford Street...
...A subtheme concerns art...
...Petersburg in 1917...
...At the dinner party, a fellow guest tries to get Lord Suzy away from his persistent narrative of how the burglars "peed on all the walls," because dry champagne is being served in tubular glasses...
Vol. 73 • December 1990 • No. 16
