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65 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Creme de la Creme: A Work For The Mature Mind, November 20, 2005
My first encounter with Jean Brodie came via Maggie Smith's very memorable performance in the 1960s film of the same name--a very fine film indeed. But those who come to Muriel Sparks' novel through the film are in for quite a surprise: although the basic characters and the story itself are recognizable, the tone is quite different and the novel works to a greatly different point. In a general sense, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is a portrait of a place, Edinburgh of the 1930s, a particular time, an era in which women were dominated by strict codes of behavior. Those who did not conform these codes were on a collision course with society, and so it is with Miss Jean Brodie, school teacher at the conservative Marsha Blaine School For Girls. A pseudo-intellectual with a sensual disposition, Miss Brodie sets out to visit her own ambitions on the next generation--and with very mixed results. The next generation in question is a particular group of girls who fall into Miss Brodie's hands through the school, a group that quickly becomes known as "the Brodie set" and are noted for their excessive loyalty to her and to her romantically inclined attitudes to life. But Miss Brodie has erred: for all her claim to special insight, she is largely oblivious to the true nature of their characters, and while she has an undeniable impact on their lives it is not precisely the impact she seeks or expects. There are no suddenly plot twists, no great turns in the novel in any dramatic sense; instead, the book is about the revelation of character that can only occur with time. Miss Brodie first appears as a fascinating figure, but as her students grow to maturity and perceive her in new and different lights our own impression of her changes. Is she, as one student says near the end of the novel, "a silly woman," a woman of false emotion and half-thought-out ideas, a Scottish Madame Bovary? And what of the children in her care, whose lives take such unexpected (and, to Miss Brodie, often undesirable) paths when they leave her behind? Are they really the "Creme de la Creme" after all? Sparks presents her story in what might be called layers of time, allowing us to see past, present, and future all at once; it is a remarkable bit of writing, alternately smooth and sharp, sweet and bitter, and all to surprising effect. At the same time the novel is concise, condensing a great deal into the fewest pages possible. A quick read, yes, but one that most will find unexpectedly demanding. In the end, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is about character and how it is shaped by ourselves, by others, and by our various circumstances--and how we either accept or rebell against that impact. Although THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is frequently offered in high school and early college literature courses, I personally do not feel it will have much relevance for any one much under the age of 40; it is the sort of novel that requires the reader to bring considerable life-experience of their own to the tale, and without it book may seem shapeless and trivial. It is very much an adult's book and should be approached with that fact clearly in mind. Strongly recommended. GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
'There were legions of her kind', October 27, 2004
This review is from: Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Hardcover)
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is. 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.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, January 9, 2001
Students who are forced to read this slender but pithy novel in high school or university classes often dismiss it was being 'about nothing', or just a dead bore. Which is a shame, as this powerful novel from Muriel Spark is one that needs to be appreciated and taken seriously - and enjoyed - by all readers, whether those in high school or those who lecture on it to classrooms of bored university students. Perhaps the lack of appreciation for this novel by students is the lack of interest with which teachers approach it. Perhaps it hits too close to the bone for many teachers, who, like Miss Brodie, endeavour to shape and form their 'set' and who, perhaps unwittingly, manipulate their students in the worst ways. Whatever the reason, this text is one that should be read and taught ethusiastically, for it packs into its 150-odd pages a deeply comic yet troubling bunch of themes: betrayal, fitting-in, the power of imagination, adultery, and most importantly, the transfiguration of the commonplace. In a way the book is at the same time a paeon to and a curse of the imagination, demonstrating how it can enrich life (such as in the antics of Sandy and Jenny) yet also how it can damage others (such as Miss Brodie's false and manipulative ideas about love, sex, Teddy, Rose and so forth). Muriel Spark writes about things she knows well, in this case teaching, Edinburgh, girls schools, sex and betrayal. A book not only worth reading, but well worth teaching, and an excellent introduction to the works of Spark, whose other works are equally compelling and astute.
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