I know this is meant to be a comic novel, but I felt rather sad reading it. The Brodie set are effectively an implicated chorus, and we're removed from Miss Brodie. Spark has a very mocking tone and it's not clear how we are supposed to feel towards Brodie, aside from a certain suspicion about her motivation for keeping the set of young girls in thrall to her rather strange beliefs. It was written in 1961, and seems to capture a kind of cusp of female experience, in that the Brodie set - most of them - will go on to have the kinds of choices that aren't open to their mentor herself. It's set pre-war, but the novel has a loop-like structure - Spark freely uses prolepsis to embody stylistically her theme of fatefulness. Yet, Miss Brodie's plans for the girls never come to fruition. They reject her, and she is finally betrayed by the 'best' of her set for her 'teaching' of fascism - though it is more obviously Miss Brodie's Calvinist-like approach to life that cause her rejection.
Though the religious interpretation is hard to avoid, I don't particularly like it. I think this is why I don't enjoy later T.S.Eliot and have avoided a few Graham Greene novels...But anyway, the writing is wonderful - despite the constant flash-forwards, there's this growing sense of tension as to Brodie's intentions, and the girls' own attitudes towards her. I love her use of personification( 'reflective smoke')- and the lurching forwards, where paragraphs, alternately about the past or future, will be connected by an image or a phrase. The dialogue and the characterisations are so economic, yet revealing.
James Woods on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "Her brilliantly reduced style, of "never apologise, never explain", seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into round discs.
"But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone and in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters."
