January 11
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Sparks (1961)

This was one of a dozen or so books that passed through my home while I was working on the latest King William's College quiz. Because it's my nature to be obsessive about documentation, I was determined to provide a link verifying each answer. For the literary ones (which was most of them, it seemed), if the text wasn't available online I'd borrow the book from the library and scan the relevant page myself.

A few of the books I borrowed in this way I thought I might read, but The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie wasn't one of them. And yet, one idle day I happened to pick it up to take a look inside, and to my great surprise I was hooked enough to read the whole thing. (It's not that long.)

It was not at all what I expected. I was vaguely aware that a movie had been made from the book way back in the 1960s or 1970s. My dim and erroneous impression of that movie had me thinking it was an expansive epic romance full of powerful emotions, desperate characters and anguished choices. In fact, it was nothing like that. It's a crisp and quirky little book, and nearly the opposite of romantic.

The story is told in the standard third-person omniscient, so the narrator isn't a character in the story. The narrator has a distinct personality nevertheless; it's what first caught my attention when I started reading and it's what kept me hooked. It's a peculiarly aloof and detached voice. The writing is often vivid and descriptive of persons, places and things, but never with much warmth. It's very strange. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of fiction, but I can't think of anything else quite like it.

Descriptions of the main characters are routinely unflattering, but in a way that seems more mechanical than malicious. Miss Brodie probably gets the best treatment, if only because we mostly see her through the eyes of the girls, and they all adore her (well, in the earlier years they do), but even she doesn't seem all that attractive to the reader. Mentions of the girls, especially at the beginning of the book, are repeatedly accompanied by little formulaic descriptions, which feel like a cross between Homeric epithets ("Diomedes, master of the war-cry", "Agamemnon, skilled breaker of horses") and simple conversational reminders to help you remember who's who, sort of like, "she's the one who is such-and-such".

For the one girl who is the closest thing to a protagonist we are constantly reminded that she has "small, almost non-existent eyes", which doesn't sound very pretty. Another of the girls is stupid, and the narrator tells us so frequently and matter-of-factly. This same girl will later die an unpleasant death, a fact which is also related repeatedly and with no sympathy.

The other strange thing about the narrative voice it's careless attitude — literally, as if it simply doesn't care — toward chronological order. The book tells the story of a group of girls who are the favorites of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher at a school for girls. The narrative tells how the girls grow up and change, from their first years in the school through to graduation ... except that it doesn't tell it in that order. It hops about from year to year, with occasional parenthetics to later adulthood. It's not foreshadowing, it's just out of order. It's as if some person is telling you the story but that person is scatterbrained and impatient so she keeps jumping around and forgetting where she was — so she just keeps telling in whatever order things come up till eventually everything has been filled in.

The same disregard for time is often built right into a sentence, which will offhandedly and for no particular reason, mention something that hasn't happened yet. Here's one, about the stupid girl:

Mary's demise in the fire is not really relevant to the story in any way, but it gets mentioned several times both before and after we get a broader account of the event.

The nonchalant dropping of little surprises like that is also a distinctive characteristic of the book. Whereas in a mystery story, or in a pseudo-mystery like one of the Harry Potter novels, the author carefully reveals the clues all in good time to maximize the suspense, in Brodie, Sparks reveals them haphazardly and seemingly accidentally, so that you're reading along about something else and suddenly you say, "Whoa, wait, what? you hadn't told me that before."

This is alluded to in one of the promotional blurbs on the back of the book. I had read these blurbs earlier, before I intended to read the book. (Actually, I never intended to read the book: I just did it, and even as I was doing it I hadn't really made up my mind to finish.) The blurb attributed to The Spectator reads:

Alas, I think having read that description lessened my enjoyment of the book. It makes it sound like a traditional mystery with a big jackpot at the end, which it's really not. As I read, I kept wondering what the stiletto stab would be. It never happens. In retrospect I'm sure I know which surprise the reviewer has in mind, but it's not so dramatic as all that, and it's not that much of a surprise either. When I read it, my response was something like, "Yeah, that figures," which isn't what you expect from a mystery.

I almost skipped the obligatory vocabulary section, but if I leave it out, someone is bound to ask about it. My word list for this book is pretty short, and most of the words are proper names — Cimabue (an Italian Renaissance painter), Marie Stopes (an early 20th century Scottish advocate of birth control), the Canongate (a neighborhood in Edinburgh), meccanos (not sure; I think a brand of shoes).

The rest are mostly Scrabblish and Bogglish words. The story takes place in Edinburgh, and though the narrative isn't loaded up with Scottishness, occasionally someone will speak one of those words that I only know from the Scrabble dictionary's assurance that it really is a word in Scottish, which is a dialect of English, so therefore the word is playable — like sae (= so) or maun (= must). It's nice to see them in print. Next time I play one in Scrabble it won't feel quite so artificial.

I also saw rota for the first time outside of Scrabble or Boggle. I don't know if it's Scottish. Merriam-Webster says "chiefly Brit". OSPD, in its usual terse way, says "a roster" and nothing more. Ms Sparks says,

Well, what do you know?

(Seeing pale there, I suppose I have to mention that that sort of pale has nothing to do with being faint of color. It has to do with the sort of pale that is a large pointed stick (on which one might be impaled). It comes from Latin palus, whence English pole and Spanish palo. (The latter means tree, and Stanford University's symbol is a tall tree because it's in the city of Palo Alto, and palo alto means "tall tree".) If one wishes to fortify a settlement, one rings it with a fence of pales (aka palisades). If you're within the ring, you're protected; if you're not, you're outside the pale.)

One more word on my list, tussore, is a Scrabble word only indirectly. In the days before flexible searching of online word lists became commonplace, Scrabble players studied printed word lists. These lists were often anagrammed and alphabetized, so if, for example, your rack spells RUNCINO, and you think, "Hmm, I wonder if that spells something", you alphabetize it and look up CINNORU, and the word list tells you that you have unicorn. After a while you get used to alphabetizing your rack, and knowing where to go in the word list. The very last entry on the seven-letter list is RSSSTUU which spells tussurs. If you look up tussurs (which surely no one would ever actually play) in the Scrabble dictionary, it tells you, in its typically unhelpful way, that a tussur is "a tussah", and when your eye glances up a few lines you see that tussor, tussore, tusser, tusseh, and tussar all mean the same thing. Up one more line, and it tells you that a tussah is "an Asian silkworm". OSPD gives that definition because when you're talking about the worm, you can pluralize it by putting an s on the end. In actual writing you're more likely to be talking about the type of silk itself, which is how it is in Miss Jean Brodie.

My one remaining note — I probably should have mentioned this back in the "narrative voice" section, but now I'm the one telling his story in haphazard fashion — observes the author's penchant for grammatically indirect sentences that take the shape of, "it was she who did such-and-such" or "it was then that so-and-so happened". This device is frequently used for an abrupt change of subject:

... And off we go with a discussion in which older Eunice tells her husband of when Miss Brodie died.

I remember reading once that a similar grammatical structure is characteristic of Irish writing — "it's there that I'll be going", "it's you must go and I must bide" — because that's the normal word order in Gaelic, and bilingual Irish naturally carry the habit into their English.

Maybe the same applies to Scottish. I don't know.

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