A few thoughts on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Miss Jean Brodie is the teacher of a smart set of six girls, known as the Brodie set, at an exclusive Edinburgh school in the 1930s. She is in her prime, and constantly reminds the girls this. Subverting the curriculum whenever possible, she tells her set about her loves and sex life, about Renaissance artists, and fascism. She also plays god and manipulates her students as she grows older, playing them between her own love interests, the music and art teachers at the school. Told in a very, very omniscient third person voice with constant flash-forwards and flash-backs, it's told that two of the girls of the Brodie set die young, and Miss Jean Brodie herself is betrayed by one of her set.

I know this is often listed as one of the best books of the century, of the English language, and so forth, but I had a bit of a hard time getting into the book because of its writing, which is very consciously precocious, much like the girls themselves. The story itself is interesting and rather fun to read, once you figure out which of the girls you need to be aware of and which ones can fade into set dressing; Miss Brodie herself is a piece of work as you start by finding her sort of amusing but watch as you realize how she manipulates her students through years of schooling in ways both relatively innocently and rather subversively.

I've only read a handful of Spark novels; I've previously read (but not reviewed) both Momento Mori, which I think I may have enjoyed more than Brodie, and The Finishing School, about which I was rather on the fence. The precociousness of the writing is still the same and that somewhat annoys me. As Spark is a rather prolific British writer, I'll undoubtedly come upon more of her work, and I think I will probably approach it with caution as for me it seems to turn out either all right or rather indifferently. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may turn out to be one of those books that I'll think about much more frequently than I expected, but as of this moment (about ten minutes after finishing it) I'm in no hurry to find more.

However, sign me up for the film adaptation with Maggie Smith.