I wanted to write about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
by Muriel Spark, for the Scottish Fiction Challenge because it's a
totty wee thin book that slips quietly into your pocket (if your pockets
are big enough) but also because I read it recently with a student I'm
teaching English as a Second Language, and so had to spend a good long
time with the book despite how quick a read it could have been. When
you spend a long time with something so good, going line by line, it
grants a special sort of love, flavoured by the voice of the uncertain
reader for whom the story is gradually unfolding, by the rain pattering
on the flat roof next to the school room.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is
one of those books I had read in another schoolroom when I was a girl,
so what is known, technically, as yonks ago. And well now, isn't memory
a funny thing? Because I had totally forgotten how many reference to
sex there are in this book. From giggly schoolgirl ponderings about the
sex lives of teachers, to affairs, to almost-affairs, to a flasher, to
flash-forwards to the adult lives of those same school girls, sex is
everywhere.
How
was it I'd remembered only the acid humour and cleverness? Maybe,
because it's a Great Book of Middle Class Scottish Literature I managed
to file it away under the wrong categories.
I
will have particularly fond memories of reaching the part where Sandy
and Jenny are writing an imagined, and terribly overly-formal letter
from Miss Brodie to her hapless lover, the school singing teacher Gordon
Lowther, and feeling myself shake with suppressed laughter all the way
through and at the very last line of the letter...
Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.
...exploding
into snorts, along with the student. So, there is that aspect to the
book. Be wary, using this as a core text for educational purposes. Ahem.
But
of course, being Muriel Spark, whose eyes glint with steel in them,
there's more than the (rather taboo at the time) exploration of sexual
awareness in girls. There's the perfectly adroit use of language, and
tight plotting.
There's
even room for the strategic use of repetition, which in lesser hands
would be wearying, here bolsters the feeling that what we have here is
not merely a little sliver of a moment - in the classrooms of a private
school, but an indisputable image of scope: of betrayals, politics,
faith, and the grande dame, Edinburgh itself.
If
you haven't read it, I urge you to do so. If you've the chance, within a
schoolroom, or something like it - echoing, pale-lit, terribly
Edinburgh in appearance, that would make the perfect setting. If nothing
else, at least fetch yourself some scones, and archly pour yourself
some tea of the Scottish Breakfast variety, and enjoy.
Helen McClory is a writer and book reviewer currently based in Edinburgh. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.
