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lee_foust 's review for:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
It's been a busy week so I'm sorry to say I didn't have time to write about this novel when it was fresh in my mind and I feel as though I might not do it justice now, distracted as I am. This is only my second Muriel Spark novel but I'm already quite a fan. What I like best about her writing in this novel is the way the story unfolds in ragged splashes of information, paying little attention to either chronology or a typical modernist technique of first person narrator's recollections or whatever. It's wholly unrealistic, unexplained, and just perfect. It's best described, I guess, as simply artistic. The story happens in exactly the way it needs to dramatically. Art for art's sake. And it's beautiful.
I don't mean to insinuate by this that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is unrealistic or of the fairy tale variety or postmodern or anything like that. Rather it's scrumptiously unique. An omniscient narrator weaves in and out of various characters' heads to tell us the story as it should be told without worrying about literary convention or realism--so, as a reader, I didn't either. I just sat breathlessly following the little adventure of Miss Brodie's gathering together of her student set, their development, Miss Brodie's betrayal by one of them, and then their fates as adults. Terrific stuff. A wonderful window on a bygone era in an interesting place (Edinburgh) and into an interesting slice of a female and young person's world. All of these things were rather vividly invoked.
Thematically, Spark seems to me--again, only two novels, this one and The Bachelors--extremely subtle. I wondered here if Miss Brodie's admiration of Mussolini (and later Hitler too) although mentioned more-or-less in passing, meant that we were being invited to consider the dynamics of fascism in the form of an elementary school teacher's influence over a group of her favorite students. (This would perhaps verge on satire, and Spark--in both the novels I've read-- does display a viciously ironic wit.) In the end, though, I'm not sure the novel makes much of a political statement--but I do believe the detail of Miss Brodie's admiration of all things Italian is psychologically accurate for the portraiture of her character--an elementary school teacher in her prime. Probably most interesting here are the sexual dynamics of women of the early part of the twentieth century. The girls' burgeoning pubescent sexuality becomes part of Miss Brodie's own renounced (perhaps?) and deflected sexuality through her already established "set." Creepy stuff, in the end--all the more so because the novel captures, particularly in its opening chapters, the innocence of the elementary school girls.
I don't mean to insinuate by this that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is unrealistic or of the fairy tale variety or postmodern or anything like that. Rather it's scrumptiously unique. An omniscient narrator weaves in and out of various characters' heads to tell us the story as it should be told without worrying about literary convention or realism--so, as a reader, I didn't either. I just sat breathlessly following the little adventure of Miss Brodie's gathering together of her student set, their development, Miss Brodie's betrayal by one of them, and then their fates as adults. Terrific stuff. A wonderful window on a bygone era in an interesting place (Edinburgh) and into an interesting slice of a female and young person's world. All of these things were rather vividly invoked.
Thematically, Spark seems to me--again, only two novels, this one and The Bachelors--extremely subtle. I wondered here if Miss Brodie's admiration of Mussolini (and later Hitler too) although mentioned more-or-less in passing, meant that we were being invited to consider the dynamics of fascism in the form of an elementary school teacher's influence over a group of her favorite students. (This would perhaps verge on satire, and Spark--in both the novels I've read-- does display a viciously ironic wit.) In the end, though, I'm not sure the novel makes much of a political statement--but I do believe the detail of Miss Brodie's admiration of all things Italian is psychologically accurate for the portraiture of her character--an elementary school teacher in her prime. Probably most interesting here are the sexual dynamics of women of the early part of the twentieth century. The girls' burgeoning pubescent sexuality becomes part of Miss Brodie's own renounced (perhaps?) and deflected sexuality through her already established "set." Creepy stuff, in the end--all the more so because the novel captures, particularly in its opening chapters, the innocence of the elementary school girls.