Book review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

I'd had Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie sitting in my bookshelf for a few years, after picking it up cheap at a book fair.  I'd heard of it as a worthy story, and thought it might be similar to the excellent movie Dead Poets Society (which the girls and I watched a few weeks ago).

Sad to say, Jean Brodie was a disappointment.  I wouldn't recommend it.  (Although I read that it is listed on the BBCs 100 most influential novels, for class and society.)

The story is set in a girls school in 1930s Edinburgh.  Just like Dead Poets, it's about an influential teacher (Miss Jean Brodie) whose personality inspires a small group of students to stand out and be different from the rest of the conservative school.

But unlike Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets, Miss Brodie is, at least in my opinion, right from the outset unappealing in pretty much every way.  She's an unprofessional bad teacher with wrong and ignorant ideas who arrogantly thinks she is right.  Her teaching colleagues mostly don't think much of her, and it seems that it's only a small (but strong) group of her students who are inspired by her to the extent that they are known throughout the school as the "Brodie set."  Presumably, her dozens of other students didn't find her inspiring.

Having an unlikable main character makes it hard, but not impossible, to be drawn into a story.  If the characters are psychologically deep and interesting, then a character-based story can still be engrossing.  But in the case of Jean Brodie, all the characters were presented superficially, as stereotypes with one-line descriptions, and throughout the story never rose much above that.

The back cover of the book informs us that "for comic observation and spicy dialogue it is impossible to outclass Muriel Spark."  I disagree.  Unless the comic observation was intended as bone dry and intensely self-depreciating, what social observations I saw were superficial.  As for the spicy dialogue, as far as I could see this mostly amounted to attention-grabbing out-of-place immature sexual references.  It was as if the author was trying to grab the reader's attention with light smuttiness.

The plot of the story jumped around oddly, with tension dissolved too early when it deserved to be built.  What I thought to be the two big mysteries of the story -- who betrayed Miss Jean Brodie and why Rose was famous for sex -- were explained early and cheaply.

At 128 pages it's a short story, and easy to read in a few hours.  So at least time-wise it's not a big investment in reading.  But I won't bother keeping our copy, and I won't bother offering it to Mulan to read.