Amanda, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was not a forgettable book for me.  It has stayed with me for years, and prompted several rereadings. I would go so far as to say that I find it endlessly fascinating. I’m not keen on the idea of ranking books against one another, but I do think that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliant book, fully deserving of a place on the Modern Library’s 100 best novels list. One of the things that I appreciate about Spark is her originality; she doesn’t read to me like a wannabe Waugh or a wannabe anyone else.

That said, I’m not sure that I would say I “like” it exactly. Quillhill said in his post on the book that there are no characters in it that he identifies with or roots for and that he would thus not recommend that it be read for enjoyment.  I don’t identify with or root for any of the characters either.  But I enjoyed the novel immensely nonetheless.  I get a great deal of intellectual pleasure out of Spark’s books generally, and this one in particular, because of the complexity of the characters and their motivations.  The psychological insights that she offers are very deep. She does make us work for those insights, but I think perhaps that gives them still greater depth.  I also get a lot of aesthetic pleasure out of her books because the way she uses language: the rhythms, the repetitions, the marvellous precision of her descriptions.

Looking at Brodie and Lowther from an author’s point of view, the wild charade of domesticity instead of a love affair can be seen as just another hippocracy of Brodie’s: he is married, so it’s not okay to act as his partner in physical ways, yet it’s okay to act as his partner in other caring-for-him ways.

Wow! Coming in late . . . I just read all the posts at the new blog, and now all this discussion. I’m particularly interested to know that Kate has read it four times now. When I read Loitering last year I was quite determined to read more of her novels, but after Jean Brodie and Memento Mori that desire is much lessened. Clearly Spark is a writer to be reckoned with, but I like more warmth and feeling in a book.

I do find there is a certain amount of coldness to Spark’s writing. Though the characters might feel emotion it does not necessarily translate to the reader. A Far Cry from Kensington is like that too. But I think the distance the missing emotion creates puts the reader in a position of bystander or witness to the events. We can look with a more dispassionate eye at what’s really going on instead of being swept up in the emotion of the characters. We can have our own feelings. That creates something even more complex and moves beyond the story on the page and inspires great discussion

I read my first Muriel Spark novel in the summer of 1985 and fairly quickly thereafter read all of the other novels that she had written up to that point. I was completely dazzled by her writing. I adopted her as a writing role model, not in the sense of trying to write like her, but in the sense of taking inspiration from what she had been able to achieve with words. I had a brief second look at her work when her autobiography came out in 1992, but not again until I read her last novel The Finishing School, last year. I was not impressed with The Finishing School. I found it to be thin and forgettable. (I am very much in agreement with Susan’s assessment of that book as expressed in her extra-credit post on it.) This worried me.  I feared that I had overestimated Spark and that I would feel similarly unenthusiastic upon returning to the novels that had previously so dazzled me. I am very happy that I did not find this to be the case when I returned to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the SoG read, nor am I finding The Comforters to have lost any of its power for me (it’s my extra-credit pick, and I’m now a third of the way in).

What distinguishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from The Finishing School? The latter ought to have provided a very interesting flip of the former.  It too involves a closed, school setting. It too involves disturbing power relationships between teacher and student. But in this version, much of the time it seems as if the student is the one who holds the illegitimate power. This is a fascinating idea, but I didn’t find it to be so in the execution. I’ve already said that I don’t find any of the characters in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be likeable or relatable-to, so that’s not where the distinction lies for me. I think it’s that the ideas that animate The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie matter so much more to me.  There seems to be a great deal more at stake there than in The Finishing School. I’m not invested in the characters of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but I am very much invested in how it all turns out . There’s something about that book exploring those ideas at that time, set in the 1930s, but recalled and read later when we know all too well where that sort of thinking can lead.

Having made it all sound terribly serious, I have to say that another thing that attracts me to Spark’s work is that I find her to be extremely funny.  It’s very dark humour, but it sometimes makes me laugh out loud.

Thanks for reminding me about the humor Kate. Spark is darkly funny. I found both Miss Brodie and A Far Cry from Kensington to be filled with her acerbic sense of humor. We’ve been so serious about Miss Brodie I forgot there were parts of it that made me laugh!

I agree about the humor—can’t overlook that!  The love letter Sandy and Jenny write is hilarious.  Spark does such a good job capturing how young girls would write a love letter.

I find what you have to say about liking the book and emotion and distance all very interesting.  How we can like something without LIKING it—or perhaps I should say, we like something without identifying with or relating to the characters or liking them as people.  I’m curious about what people mean when they say they like something.  As someone who experiences emotion a lot but also spends a lot of time analyzing it, I find that “liking” something isn’t a simple thing.  Feeling a sense of coldness, as you describe Stefanie, doesn’t mean I won’t like something, but for others, it does.

There’s a topic and a half! Why do we like what we like? There are probably as many answers as there are people. And does a book have to be likeable to be good?

I confess I enjoy the emotional gratification I get from romantic or heroic stories, and I consider this a weakness, or at least a limited form of literary appreciation. I don’t know that I’d read Austen every year if her books didn’t have happy endings. I suppose I also tend to enjoy books that accord with my moral views, and dislike those that do not. But a book also has to be “good” for me to enjoy it. It has to be intellectually enjoyable, as a work of art, independent of my emotional or moral preferences. Not that one can’t have intellectual preferences too. Who can say why one book tickles our brains and does nothing for another?

I agree with Sylvia, why we like something is a topic and a half. I liked Miss Brodie because of the dark humor, the clean, simple style, the underlying complexity. It’s a smart book that made me think, gave me room to think. I like that Spark doesn’t tell us how we should feel about anything. That said, I tend to like other books for the same reasons but it also doesn’t guarantee I will like a book either. And sometimes I like books that are just plain silly (like Terry Prattchet for example) or are out to tell a good story without any other pretensions. I don’t have to identify with or relate to the characters unless it’s a brain-candy kind of book in which case I need to be emotionally involved to keep from being bored.

RE: Wells
Will someone be keeping track of which “extra credit” books people choose?

Do you want to do it on the Slaves site Quillhill, or should track it in my sidebar like Sylvia so generouly did for Spark?

Like Danielle, I put a hold on the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the lead up to our SoG discussion.  I just got a phone call from the library to say that it has arrived and I’m off to pick it up.  I think that I must have seen the film before but I have no memory of it.  I’m looking forward to watching it again with the book fresh in my mind.  Danielle, have you watched it yet? Anybody else? I look forward to comparing notes at some point.

I just put a hold on it too. It would be fun to compare notes on the film. We might do the same with The Island of Doctor Moreau. There is a recent (1996) version with Burt Lancaster and Michael York.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076210/

I apologize for coming so late to the discussion. I just returned from out of town, and took a welcome break from the computer. It allowed me to get lots of reading done, which included both Miss Brodie, which I enjoyed, and The Finishing School, which I did not. This is a great discussion.

I was interested in the point that a few people made about rooting for Miss Brodie against the headmistress, but still being bothered by both her politics and her machinations with Rose. I felt that way, as did Sandy in the book, and I found that while I wouldn’t say I identified consciously with Sandy, or even liked her much as a character, I still viewed Miss Brodie much as she did--a fascinating person, a compelling teacher, yet who was a danger to her students. The smallness of Sandy’s eyes--for which she was “merely notorious"--was repeated frequently, and it struck me as a contrast with how clearly she (and the reader through her) sees the complexity of Miss Brodie, both as a student and later as an adult. I wonder if her last name, Stranger, is an ironic twist on whose eyes the reader sees through as we read the book.

I’ve now read four Spark books: Brodie, The Driver’s Seat, The Abbess of Crewe and The Finishing School, and have listed them in the descending order in which I admire them. All but the fourth have that distinctive structure that starts at the end, and weaves back and forth from the past to the present until the entire story is known. This is such an intricate structure that I can’t believe Spark didn’t have every aspect of these novels planned, including the reader perception of the characters, as I think Quillhill doubted as some point in the discussion. The novels I’ve read are emotionally removed, which is why I think I and others don’t “like” them in the conventional sense. They also don’t necessarily have sympathetic characters, or ones I overtly identify with. But they are well written, skillfully plotted, grim and darkly funny. All of these make them linger in my mind once they are closed.

Hello Slaves - Thought this might be the easiest way to contact you. You may have seen the newest redesign of MetaxuCafe. I’ve made a special place for discussion groups like yours. I think your group has been dormant for a bit, but just wanted you to know that the space is there for you if you want it - I think holding your discussion at MetaxuCafe is good for broadening your audience and getting lots of interaction. If for any reason you don’t want the space on the site for you, that’s okay too, just let me know. - Bud

http://metaxucafe.com/cafe/discussions/slavesofg/