The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" introduces the Edinburgh schoolmistress in 1936, surrounded by her notorious 'Brodie Set' of sixteen-year-old girls over whose lives and relationships she seeks almost divine ordinance. A few pages on, the narrative shifts backwards to 1930, showing the reader a small cameo of the Miss Brodie and her class of impressionable girls of ten. This initial anachrony is a common enough technique. However, as we advance through the narrative all the way to 1939 when the 'Brodie Set' are young women of eighteen or nineteen, their schooldays behind them, Spark's skill becomes increasingly apparent. Her sequence of fourteen forward glances and fourteen backward looks builds into a subtle composition of the 'Brodie Set' in childhood, adolescence, and adult life.

Spark writes a cool, calm, and collected narrative in which prolepses never render the text predictable but stage subtle surprises as we move beyond the main story of 1930 to '39 to shift back and forth across a time-span of three decades. Early in the novel, we meet a middle-aged, comfortably married Eunice sharing childhood memories with her husband and planning to visit the grave of her one-time schoolmistress. This extraordinary narrative movement, shuttling the reader forward in order to look back, hints at the style of Miss Brodie's impact. The memento mori is to be combined with the Edinburgh Festival. The schoolmistress, for all her desire to play God in her pupil's lives, inspired both love and a love of the arts. This section of the book is also among its most poignant as the reader learns how Miss Brodie's retirement was involved with a personal tragedy, that she has been 'betrayed' by one of 'her girls'. It is much later that the Sparkian narrator thrusts us towards 1939 to reveal the identity of the teenaged traitor. The revelation is quite matter-of-fact but we now pay far greater attention to the perspective of the character in question since we realise that our understanding of the novel hinges on her understanding of Miss Brodie. At the same time, previous incidents are given an ironic tinge, often taking on considerable import because we share the narrator's omniscient knowledge of Miss Brodie's betrayal.

The question Spark perpetually evokes through her use of narrative anachrony is not 'What happens next?' but 'Why will this happen?'. Miss Brodie is without doubt culpable in her desire for an omnipotent and omniscient rôle in the lives of her pupils. Nevertheless, as Spark highlights her awareness that omnipotence and omniscience are attributes of God alone, attributes necessarily stolen from the 'author of life' by authors of conventional realism, she rejects the absolute moral stance of the realist tradition. Her narrative offers no singular moral perspective on the betrayal of Jean Brodie but leaves us free to make our own judgement from the knowledge anachrony has granted. Spark's readers, aware of how emerging patterns repattern the past, patterns which the realist writer more usually disguises, are left to question whether an absolute past is, perhaps unknowable and therefore beyond judgement. 'I don't claim that my novels are truth', insists Muriel Spark, 'they are fiction out of which a kind of truth emerges....I keep in my mind that...I am writing...fiction because I am interested in truth-- absolute truth.'

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is a novel to which many readers will wish to return again and again, each time gaining fresh insights into the personalities of Miss Brodie and her girls, and the subtle narrative technique of their creator. To readers who are looking for an academic analysis of this novel I recommend the commentary included in "Revolving Culture" by Angus Calder.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.