I have a new favorite novel. Or rather, novella: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
I’d picked up a collection of Muriel Spark’s work because of “The Driver’s Seat”, a short story that was eventually turned into one of my all-time favorite movies (which, for reasons still unclear to me, was also released as Identikit and Psychotic). Turns out the short story isn’t as good as the movie: Spark’s writing style is dynamic, but she compresses time, flattens it out, so that we can see everything that has happened and will happen in one fell swoop. That’s fine for some things, but the film turned Spark’s work into a sort of psychological study/thriller, unraveling the plot in a linear fashion and leaving the surprise ’till the end. Much better, IMHO.
When I finished “The Driver’s Seat”, I thumbed idly through The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was hooked in about three pages. I mean, c’mon–what’s not to love? It’s about a prim girls school in Edinburgh and one rebellious teacher who encourages her small cadre of students to think differently about the world around them. It’s like Picnic at Hanging Rock meets the Dead Poets Society meets Children of the Damned. (Oddly, Peter Weir directed the first two of those, and Picnic was released in 1975, the same year as The Driver’s Seat. Weird.)
Here’s one of my favorite passages, where Spark’s flattening-of-time thing really works. It’s about Mary Macgregor, a girl constantly chided by her classmates and Miss Brodie for being slow, stupid, and lazy:
Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realized that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery–when her first and last boy-friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again–she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled, and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. “Who has spilled ink on the floor–was it you, Mary?”
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