Challenge Tuesday – 32

After my recent re-reads, I decided to try something new again.  I didn’t realise what an odd story it would be!

Book 32 – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark.  Miss Brodie teaches at Marcia Blaine School, in 1930s Edinburgh; one of the generation of women who lost their loves in the Great War.  She is an educator, a Svengali figure to her favoured students: the six girls who become known as the Brodie Set.  She tells them how she dedicates her prime to them and in return they offer an unswerving loyalty, until one girl realises that Miss Brodie’s truths are not her own…

Well, I’m not sure where to start with this one!

Miss Brodie is a manipulator, a woman whose ‘prime’ is wasted on schemes for her pupils and love affairs with unsuitable men.  She is a deceiver, a fascist sympathiser who teaches her ‘girls’ about the benefits of Mussolini and Hitler.  She lives vicariously through them, even encouraging a love affair with the married man she loves, in order to ask for details. She considers herself a talented teacher, bringing forth the personalities of her favourite few even as she belittles and pressurises them.  Her relationship with the girls continues long after she stops teaching them, even into their adulthood, and yet she never seems able to be honest with them.  When her teaching career ends as a result of her politics, Miss Brodie’s decline is rapid.  She never forgets that one of her own girls betrayed her.

Miss Brodie is both a sympathetic character – her first love killed in Flanders aged 22, her second a married man and her third proposes to their colleague without telling her – but also deeply unpleasant with her bullying ways and scheming.  She brainwashes the young girls into believing her view of the world is the only one, and that their value is what she places on them: if only they behave as she says, they will be the ‘créme de la créme’ she thinks they can be…

Meanwhile, the girls are a lumpen bundle, their personalities and choices contingent on each other and Miss Brodie, their world view shaped by hers.  They follow paths she has set down for them, behave as she has demanded.  Their childhood given oven, in part, to her vanity.  Despite all being ‘famous’ for some reason they merge into a collective whole that is exposed to an adult world long before they are equipped to deal with the consequences.

And so we are left with a story of childhood warped, of personalities frozen in amber.  Only when they leave school do the girls have a chance to slough off the ties and make their own choices.  You are left with the feeling that this is the greatest betrayal of all.

I found this book densely written, confusing in how it swapped from one young mind to another, from the past to the future to the present rapidly and without warning; there is a lot of inner dialogue as well as lectures from Miss Brodie that contain questionable truths.  It’s a short book that demands focussed reading.  Some of the girls seemed larger than life and some faded into insignificance long before the end of the story, but the strongest voices also had the most interesting stories.

I can’t really decide if I enjoyed the story or not.  It’s strange and not at all what I expected.  It’s described as a ‘brilliantly comic novel’ but is certainly not something I would consider a comedy, at least not in the laugh out loud sense.  There is a ridiculousness to the behaviour of Miss Brodie that is darkly humorous, and the foolishness of the children sometimes raises a smile, but it’s also disturbing at its core.

Seeing this through a modern prism will no doubt influence that view – these children are being radicalised in multiple ways; one girl is even encouraged to run off to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, leading to her death.

So overall, would I recommend it to others?  No, probably not.  I am intrigued by it though, and that may yet make me want to re-visit it.

Happy reading,

EJ

🙂