The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (61 down 39 to go)

She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin…Brodie acts as if she transcends morality.

This is the first time I’ve read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Muriel Spark. The story is a modernist, existential novel, set in 1930s, Scotland. It is a novella by most standards, told mostly in third-person narrative, making use of numerous flash-forwards. It recounts the career of Jean Brodie, a progressive teacher at an all-girls school in Edinburgh, Scotland.

My rating: 3 1/2 of 5 stars

 

In the first chapter or so, I liked the novel because I liked Miss Brodie. By the end, I was not such a fan of her character, which resulted in feeling I did not like the novel. But if I distinguish between the two, I’d say it is a fairly engaging story.

The story focuses on six of Brodie’s protégés, known as the Brodie Set. Miss Brodie only has these girls from age 10 to 12, but she continues to influence them after they are promoted to the next level. The school’s headmistress does not approve and attempts to bring the Brodie set into her own confidence and discover some offense that will be grounds for Brodie’s dismissal, but the girls are aware of her duplicity and guard their words out of loyalty to their mentor.

The narrator describes the girls, each for what they were “famous” for, and how they wore their hats.

Monica Douglas:

famous mostly for mathematics which she could do in her brain, and for her anger…she wore her Panama hat rather higher on her head than normal, perched as if it were too small and as if she knew she looked grotesque in any case.

Rose Stanley:

famous for sex. Her hat was placed quite unobtrusively on her blonde short hair, but she dented in the crown on either side.

Eunice Gardiner:

famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming, had the brim of her hat turned up at the front and down at the back.

Sandy Stranger:

wore it turned up all around and as far back on her head as it could possibly go…She was merely notorious for her small, almost nonexistent, eyes, but she was famous for her vowel sounds which, long ago in the long past, in the Junior school, had enraptured Miss Brodie.

Jenny Gray:

She wore her hat with the front brim bent sharply downward; she was the prettiest and most graceful girl of the set, and this was her fame.

Mary Macgregor:

whose fame rested on her being a silent lump, a nobody who everybody could blame.

Miss Brodie said often, 

Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

And that she would make them the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie takes pride in her insight and instinct, extols these virtues, and attempts to cultivate them in her girls. She also repeatedly asserts she is in her prime.

In the beginning, I liked Miss Brodie. She was confident and unbowed by convention. I admired her independent thought and courage. But as the story progressed I realized she had an unhealthy and even dangerous influence over the girls. Miss Brodie had a very cavalier attitude about sexuality, fascist sympathies, and almost complete contempt for anyone who saw the world differently. Slowly, most of the girls drift out of her influence; Miss Brodie settles on Sandy and Rose as her prize pupils. She manipulates the two in a perverse plot to express her love by proxy to the married art teacher while at the same time toying with the affection of the bachelor music teacher. The intricate plot does not go exactly as Miss Brodie plans and eventually one of the Brodie Set betrays her, resulting in dismissal.

Miss Brodie is surprisingly passive though curious about her betrayer, and never learns it was the one girl she was certain it could not be. The girls go about different lives, with different results. One of them writes a book titled, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. When the author is questioned about the influences in her formative years, she says, 

There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.

Allusions to other Classic Literature:

Miss Brodie describes for her girls, among other things, the interior décor of the London home of A.A. Milne and the love life of Charlotte Bronte.

And she reads to them from Jane Eyre.

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Recap of Novels 51-60

Average Rating: 3.7 out of 5 Stars

 

51. ★★★½          The Big Sleep

52. ★★★½          Of Human Bondage

53. ★★★★          Death Comes for the Archbishop

54. ★★★★          Beloved

55  ★★★             The Day of the Locust
56. ★★★½          Lucky Jim
57. ★★★★½       The Call of the Wild

58. ★★★★          The Scarlet Letter

59. ★★★             Mrs. Dalloway

60. ★★★½           Light in August

 

 

Favorite: Call of the Wild

Least Favorite: Mrs. Dalloway

Best Hero/Heroine: Denver from Beloved

Most Villainous: Roger Chillingworth (Hester’s estranged husband) from The Scarlet Letter

Most interesting/Complex character: Hester from The Scarlet Letter. Honorable mention to Beloved and Pearl (Hester’s daughter)

Best Quotation: All he did was smile and say, “Take care of yourself, Denver.” But she heard it as though it were what language was made for. From Beloved

Honorable mention quotation: …the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. ~ Bishop Jean Marie Latour from Death Comes for the Archbishop

Best Subtitle: There's only one subtitle in this group, The Scarlet Letter is subtitle: A Romance. I dislike the subtitle though, as I don't consider this novel a romance, though I still consider it a superb novel.

Best film adaptation: Beloved

Worst film adaptation: I've only seen a few, and all of them were at least fairly decent portrayals.

Light in August by William Faulkner (60 down 40 to go)

He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.  The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. ~ Narrative regarding Joe Christmas

This is the first time I’ve read Light in August, and the fourth novel I’ve read by William Faulkner. Light in August is a southern-Gothic, modernist novel, set in early 1930s, Jefferson, Mississippi, a fictional setting based on Faulkner’s hometown. The location is common to most of Faulkner’s novels and many of his short stories.

My rating: 3 1/2 of 5 stars

 

I was prepared to dislike this novel because I haven’t been a big fan of Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absolam, Absolam!. But, you should infer from this ironic foreshadowing, that I found Light in August quite engaging.

I’m happy with the word engaging. In my reviews I’ve often struggled with the words enjoy or like. Think of a miserable novel like Nineteen-Eighty-Four or Under the Volcano. I can’t truly say I enjoyed or liked them. They’re not happy, not hopeful, not uplifting; they’re miserable. But, to borrow from Henry David Thoreau, they are compelling portrayals of the quietly desperate lives of the mass of humanity.

So, I found Light in August engaging. I believe Faulkner has keen insight on humanity, and a gift with words. Another reason I liked this…erm…found this engaging is that it is written mostly in third-person narrative, rather than stream of consciousness.

The story opens on Lena Grove, a poor, white, unmarried, expectant mother traveling by foot from Alabama to Mississippi in search of her child’s father. Lena gives everyone she meets a hopeful story that her “husband” is getting settled and very likely sent for her and that the message got lost in transit. Most of the people she meets are helpful, though dubious, and consider Lena hopelessly naïve and unlikely to find the father.

The reader, this reader at least, got the impression that Lena was not nearly so naïve, but that she kept up the story to avoid anyone’s pity. She was ready to accept help, but prepared to go it alone.

I liked Lena; she was brave and dauntless, as well as resourceful and hopeful.

The story turns to Joe Christmas, who as an infant was left at an orphanage on Christmas morning, hence his name. Even though his parentage is unknown, Joe suspects that he has Negro blood. Consequently he feels a misfit everywhere and is something of a loner and wanderer. He is also brave, but devious, bitter, and desperate.

Lena and Joe never cross paths, but their lives become bizarrely intertwined when Lena finally arrives in Jefferson. On that day the early evening sky is lighted by the flames of a house fire, set to conceal a horrific murder. There is the promise of reward, a fugitive, a manhunt, a birth, a trial, escape, vigilante justice, a new fugitive, and a new manhunt, though no posse this time. The hunters are only two, or three if you count the babe.

The novel ends with circumstances very nearly as they were in the beginning. It isn’t very satisfying, though not without hope. As I implied, it isn’t a happy story, just engaging.

Excerpts:

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

…it is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.

Two of them are also motionless, the woman with that stonevisaged patience of a waiting rock, the old man with a spent quality like the charred wick of a candle from which the flame has been violently blown away.

A minor character’s description of a secondary character that I found amusing:

Then I saw that he was the kind of fellow you wouldn’t see the first glance if he was alone by himself in the bottom of a empty concrete swimming pool.

And this quotation, notable only because it contains a phrase that Faulkner used as the title for a previous novel:

At last the noise and the alarm, the sound and the fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing.

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