Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Stirring it up in 60s South London, 01 Nov 2008
A delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas the devil or just a very naughty boy? Spark's prose is sparse - there's not a word wasted and it left me wanting to read it again soon.

CATCH HER IN THE RYE, 26 Jan 2008
This novel was new when I first picked it up for a train journey. I had been reading a good deal about Muriel Spark in newspaper notices at the time, so this was the chance to find out for myself. It was love at first read, and I was curious whether the wonder of it all might have survived the decades.

Muriel Spark's work is commonly classified as `satire', and I suppose that's fair. However something that her early admirers, including Evelyn Waugh, stressed was that she is not really like anyone else, and I believe that is true also. Obviously, satire has contemporary themes, so it might seem a likely candidate for early obsolescence, but a few moments' thought suggests otherwise. Juvenal Voltaire Swift and Macaulay have not exactly gone out of fashion, and are still read with enjoyment by people who cannot be bothered to look up their contemporary allusions, and 40 or more years after it was launched the satirical magazine Private Eye seems not only to be still going strong but to have passed on its special vocabulary, originally attached to figures now little remembered, to a new generation of fans. Small wonder in that case that Mrs Spark is still wearing well.

For newcomers to the author, this is as good an introduction as any. It is completely characteristic of her, it does not threaten memory overload with a huge cast of characters as The Bachelors possibly does, it stops short of being downright weird like The Hothouse by the East River, but on the other hand it escapes being lightweight like The Abbess of Crewe or even the immortal Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Of the standard Spark features, Catholicism is relegated to a brief mention, of much the usual kind, in the last page or two, but two of the characters, including the principal character (hardly qualifying as any `hero') are Scots. Her ear is as acute as ever, and readers old enough to remember the fashion for addressing people with rhyming animal names (`See you later, alligator.' `In a while, crocodile.' etc) must smile at the way the thing is done here.

The book evokes an era, and one that I remember quite well. This was the impoverished post-war Britain of dull clothes and duller food, before we first swang in the Swinging Sixties. Small manufacturing companies were still common, and it was still common for them to be British-owned and managed before automation, globalisation, the EU, MBA's and consultant-speak set in. Mrs Spark is a talented observer and mimic, and as usual there is little or no sense of affection for, or between, any of her characters. She is funny in a wry way rather than any aisles-rolled-in way, and as usual you never quite know where you are with her. Situations can become serious and even lethal in the proverbial twinkling of an optic, and one of her dramatis personae in this book is murdered and there is another attempt at murder or at least serious assault.

There is no outright irrationality this time, at least if you opt as I do for the theory that the bumps on Dougal's head are only sebaceous cysts. However Spark's characters are mainly just marionettes puppets and caricatures, and I'd say that goes for all of them in this book. I'm not sure whether I have been to Peckham in south London or to the Rye, which is an area of parkland or similar, but it features occasionally these days in news items about gang crime, knife crime and gun crime, often with an ethnic basis. It got headlines just a day or two ago when the ineffable current holder of the post of Home Secretary told us that she was afraid to go out at night for a takeaway meal in Peckham, and she has a constant police escort. That was what prompted me to reread the Ballad of Peckham Rye, because the title is a good one - like the ancient ballads this novel captures the feel of a time and place otherwise receding into inexact memory and helps us match it up against what it is like, or what we are told it is like, now. I never met Muriel Spark in person, I may or may not ever have seen Peckham Rye, but in a sense I shall always know her from there.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Stirring it up in 60s South London, 01 Nov 2008
A delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas the devil or just a very naughty boy? Spark's prose is sparse - there's not a word wasted and it left me wanting to read it again soon.

CATCH HER IN THE RYE, 26 Jan 2008
This novel was new when I first picked it up for a train journey. I had been reading a good deal about Muriel Spark in newspaper notices at the time, so this was the chance to find out for myself. It was love at first read, and I was curious whether the wonder of it all might have survived the decades.

Muriel Spark's work is commonly classified as `satire', and I suppose that's fair. However something that her early admirers, including Evelyn Waugh, stressed was that she is not really like anyone else, and I believe that is true also. Obviously, satire has contemporary themes, so it might seem a likely candidate for early obsolescence, but a few moments' thought suggests otherwise. Juvenal Voltaire Swift and Macaulay have not exactly gone out of fashion, and are still read with enjoyment by people who cannot be bothered to look up their contemporary allusions, and 40 or more years after it was launched the satirical magazine Private Eye seems not only to be still going strong but to have passed on its special vocabulary, originally attached to figures now little remembered, to a new generation of fans. Small wonder in that case that Mrs Spark is still wearing well.

For newcomers to the author, this is as good an introduction as any. It is completely characteristic of her, it does not threaten memory overload with a huge cast of characters as The Bachelors possibly does, it stops short of being downright weird like The Hothouse by the East River, but on the other hand it escapes being lightweight like The Abbess of Crewe or even the immortal Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Of the standard Spark features, Catholicism is relegated to a brief mention, of much the usual kind, in the last page or two, but two of the characters, including the principal character (hardly qualifying as any `hero') are Scots. Her ear is as acute as ever, and readers old enough to remember the fashion for addressing people with rhyming animal names (`See you later, alligator.' `In a while, crocodile.' etc) must smile at the way the thing is done here.

The book evokes an era, and one that I remember quite well. This was the impoverished post-war Britain of dull clothes and duller food, before we first swang in the Swinging Sixties. Small manufacturing companies were still common, and it was still common for them to be British-owned and managed before automation, globalisation, the EU, MBA's and consultant-speak set in. Mrs Spark is a talented observer and mimic, and as usual there is little or no sense of affection for, or between, any of her characters. She is funny in a wry way rather than any aisles-rolled-in way, and as usual you never quite know where you are with her. Situations can become serious and even lethal in the proverbial twinkling of an optic, and one of her dramatis personae in this book is murdered and there is another attempt at murder or at least serious assault.

There is no outright irrationality this time, at least if you opt as I do for the theory that the bumps on Dougal's head are only sebaceous cysts. However Spark's characters are mainly just marionettes puppets and caricatures, and I'd say that goes for all of them in this book. I'm not sure whether I have been to Peckham in south London or to the Rye, which is an area of parkland or similar, but it features occasionally these days in news items about gang crime, knife crime and gun crime, often with an ethnic basis. It got headlines just a day or two ago when the ineffable current holder of the post of Home Secretary told us that she was afraid to go out at night for a takeaway meal in Peckham, and she has a constant police escort. That was what prompted me to reread the Ballad of Peckham Rye, because the title is a good one - like the ancient ballads this novel captures the feel of a time and place otherwise receding into inexact memory and helps us match it up against what it is like, or what we are told it is like, now. I never met Muriel Spark in person, I may or may not ever have seen Peckham Rye, but in a sense I shall always know her from there.

The Driver's Seat, 20 Sep 2004
This is a realy interesting book which makes you question what you expect from reading and why. All the obvious pattern are absent in this novella which left me feeling lost and confused throughout, however upon completion this seemed entirely suitable. The Driver's Seat follows Lise the main character as she holidays somewhere in the south and seems to create her own ultimate ending. She is in the driver's seat as she takes control of her life and also her end, or is she? Reading this was an entirely new experience in novel reading and one which has opened my eyes to new and different literary forms. I would recoment this novel, it is interesting, different and unusual.

Mind Blowing, 04 Jan 2001
Lise is bored of her mundane life and decides to go on holiday but in search of what? Ths piece follows the story line of a classic murder story with a seriously twisted end. An extremely intelligent and mind blowing text from Muriel Spark.

Mind Blowing, 04 Jan 2001
Lise is bored of her mundane life and decides to go on holiday but in search of what? Ths piece follows the story line of a classic murder story with a seriously twisted end. An extremely intelligent and mind blowing text from Muriel Spark.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Stirring it up in 60s South London, 01 Nov 2008
A delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas the devil or just a very naughty boy? Spark's prose is sparse - there's not a word wasted and it left me wanting to read it again soon.

CATCH HER IN THE RYE, 26 Jan 2008
This novel was new when I first picked it up for a train journey. I had been reading a good deal about Muriel Spark in newspaper notices at the time, so this was the chance to find out for myself. It was love at first read, and I was curious whether the wonder of it all might have survived the decades.

Muriel Spark's work is commonly classified as `satire', and I suppose that's fair. However something that her early admirers, including Evelyn Waugh, stressed was that she is not really like anyone else, and I believe that is true also. Obviously, satire has contemporary themes, so it might seem a likely candidate for early obsolescence, but a few moments' thought suggests otherwise. Juvenal Voltaire Swift and Macaulay have not exactly gone out of fashion, and are still read with enjoyment by people who cannot be bothered to look up their contemporary allusions, and 40 or more years after it was launched the satirical magazine Private Eye seems not only to be still going strong but to have passed on its special vocabulary, originally attached to figures now little remembered, to a new generation of fans. Small wonder in that case that Mrs Spark is still wearing well.

For newcomers to the author, this is as good an introduction as any. It is completely characteristic of her, it does not threaten memory overload with a huge cast of characters as The Bachelors possibly does, it stops short of being downright weird like The Hothouse by the East River, but on the other hand it escapes being lightweight like The Abbess of Crewe or even the immortal Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Of the standard Spark features, Catholicism is relegated to a brief mention, of much the usual kind, in the last page or two, but two of the characters, including the principal character (hardly qualifying as any `hero') are Scots. Her ear is as acute as ever, and readers old enough to remember the fashion for addressing people with rhyming animal names (`See you later, alligator.' `In a while, crocodile.' etc) must smile at the way the thing is done here.

The book evokes an era, and one that I remember quite well. This was the impoverished post-war Britain of dull clothes and duller food, before we first swang in the Swinging Sixties. Small manufacturing companies were still common, and it was still common for them to be British-owned and managed before automation, globalisation, the EU, MBA's and consultant-speak set in. Mrs Spark is a talented observer and mimic, and as usual there is little or no sense of affection for, or between, any of her characters. She is funny in a wry way rather than any aisles-rolled-in way, and as usual you never quite know where you are with her. Situations can become serious and even lethal in the proverbial twinkling of an optic, and one of her dramatis personae in this book is murdered and there is another attempt at murder or at least serious assault.

There is no outright irrationality this time, at least if you opt as I do for the theory that the bumps on Dougal's head are only sebaceous cysts. However Spark's characters are mainly just marionettes puppets and caricatures, and I'd say that goes for all of them in this book. I'm not sure whether I have been to Peckham in south London or to the Rye, which is an area of parkland or similar, but it features occasionally these days in news items about gang crime, knife crime and gun crime, often with an ethnic basis. It got headlines just a day or two ago when the ineffable current holder of the post of Home Secretary told us that she was afraid to go out at night for a takeaway meal in Peckham, and she has a constant police escort. That was what prompted me to reread the Ballad of Peckham Rye, because the title is a good one - like the ancient ballads this novel captures the feel of a time and place otherwise receding into inexact memory and helps us match it up against what it is like, or what we are told it is like, now. I never met Muriel Spark in person, I may or may not ever have seen Peckham Rye, but in a sense I shall always know her from there.

The Driver's Seat, 20 Sep 2004
This is a realy interesting book which makes you question what you expect from reading and why. All the obvious pattern are absent in this novella which left me feeling lost and confused throughout, however upon completion this seemed entirely suitable. The Driver's Seat follows Lise the main character as she holidays somewhere in the south and seems to create her own ultimate ending. She is in the driver's seat as she takes control of her life and also her end, or is she? Reading this was an entirely new experience in novel reading and one which has opened my eyes to new and different literary forms. I would recoment this novel, it is interesting, different and unusual.

Mind Blowing, 04 Jan 2001
Lise is bored of her mundane life and decides to go on holiday but in search of what? Ths piece follows the story line of a classic murder story with a seriously twisted end. An extremely intelligent and mind blowing text from Muriel Spark.

Mind Blowing, 04 Jan 2001
Lise is bored of her mundane life and decides to go on holiday but in search of what? Ths piece follows the story line of a classic murder story with a seriously twisted end. An extremely intelligent and mind blowing text from Muriel Spark.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Returning in my prime, 07 Aug 2008
Was inspired to read Miss Brodie - for the umpteenth time - by seeing the film again on television last week. The first time I read this book, I was about the same age as her pupils ... now you might kindly describe me as in my prime! (Like Miss B, I'm not quite sure how long prime lasts!)
This is a book I have enjoyed more each time I have read it. Spark's wonderful spare writing and dry observation (Whatever possessed you? said Miss B in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke ... )
Of course, she is a silly, preposterous, dangerous woman, but you know you would have wanted to be chosen as one of her girls. But this reading I grasped how her tragedy was rooted in World War I, that she was
part of that generation of vigorous post-war spinsters who espoused causes instead of men. How different her life would have been had Hugh, her first pure love, not died on Flanders field ...

Skilful and sometimes witty prose, 30 Jan 2008
This short novella tells the story of a school mistress named Jean Brodie, who works at an expensive private school in Edinburgh. It also tells the story of a group of girls who are heavily influenced by the words of Miss Brodie as they make the transition from children to adults.

With wit, and sometimes a pinch of snobbery, Jean Brodie advises the girls on many different aspects of life, in a sense trying to prepare them for their futures, encouraging them to do great things with their lives.

Much of the dialogue is subtly humourous, and the amorous attentions of two of the school's male staff, towards Jean Brodie, are the focus of many of the young girl's conversations.

A gradual shift away from Miss Brodie's influential words occurs as the girls move further and further from their childhoods. Then, when the girls are in their late teens, eventually a parting of the ways occurs, together with the romances of several of the girls, and one of the girl's eventual betrayal of Jean Brodie, with regard to her unconventional teaching methods.

This is an enjoyable story, told with wit, attention to detail and great deftness of prose. Which makes it's status as a modern classic quite understandable.

McEwan makes Jean Brodie live, 10 May 2006
Of all the audio books in my collection, this is the one I return to time and time again. I can almost hear Brodie calling across the playground to her girls when I think about it. It's a succinct but skilful rendition of the book, cleverly edited so it retains the essence of the story and flows beautifully. The important parts of this intriguing book are all there, but what you loose when you read the novel is Geraldine McEwan's immaculate interpretation of Jean Brodie.

I thought the film was feeble after reading the book. But this isn't it. Please can we have it on CD as I'm running out of places to play the tape?

'There were legions of her kind', 28 Oct 2004
By now I'm sure that Miss Jean Brodie and her prime are better known from the film than from the original novel. The film, and the absolutely wonderful stage production that preceded it in London with Vanessa Redgrave as the first Brodie, caught one side, the caricature side, of Muriel Spark's immortal creation, but the story is a more complex matter altogether, short though the book is.

Any story by Muriel Spark is complex up to a point - her way of thinking is devious and unstraightforward and her characters tend to inhabit the moral and motivational lowlands. Insofar as they seem like real people at all rather than clever animations, her attitude towards them is usually ambivalent. Indeed it's almost fair to say that she makes her feelings for her own creations clearest, and expresses them most strongly, when those feelings consist most of repugnance, as with Patrick Seton and Father Socket in The Bachelors. Nevertheless she always seems to distance herself successfully from their general squalor through her quick wits and the dazzling speed at which she keeps rearranging the scenery.

This book has a lot of the familiar Spark 'feel' to it, but it's a bit different in some ways too. It's short, but it doesn't come across to me as a lightweight effort like The Abbess of Crewe. The cast of characters is not as large as in The Bachelors or The Ballad of Peckham Rye, but it's large enough. What makes it simpler is that it consists largely of a group of juveniles on the one hand, and on the other it is absolutely dominated by one single outsize personality, maybe the nearest to a true heroine or hero that Spark ever allowed herself. Jean Brodie is a silly woman but not a mean or corrupt one and that, in a novel by Muriel Spark, is quite something not to be. Another thing that may have softened the author's stance is that the setting is not London or the east side of Manhattan or Crewe or any other foreign clime, but her own native Edinburgh. I don't suppose she is trying to conceal her affection for it (although being who she is she doesn't indulge it either), or if she is she has failed at that. I can recognise the kinds of people and the kinds of attitude through a similar if not identical background, and it has brought out a most unusual candour in the author. At the start of chapter 3 there is a very straightforward account of the kind of Edinburgh spinster that Jean Brodie exemplifies. Spark typically springs it on us who it was that 'betrayed' Miss Brodie, but once she has done so she takes us through the person's thought-processes with a most untypical clarity. The book shuttles backwards and forwards through time-frames, but this time with a sheer naturalness that conceals the cleverness of it. There is even a rare glimpse into the author's fascination with Catholicism when she discusses Miss Brodie's semi-ecumenical religious interests. Above all the typical spurts of sarcasm and ridicule are more often funny than bitchy, not the other way round as is more usual from her.

A taste for Muriel Spark is a bit of a mini-religion itself. This book might make her a few converts.

fab wee play!, 06 Sep 2003
very often books that have been translated into plays (and also films) lose all their sparkle. this one, however does not. It is just as good as the book if not better at times - and as a performance piece it works wonderfully - providing there is the back up of talented actors.
overall, this play is a nostalgic look at the life and troubles of a 1930's madam - with radical ideas beyond her time and how detrimental this ends up being to her pupils.

Stirring it up in 60s South London, 01 Nov 2008
A delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas the devil or just a very naughty boy? Spark's prose is sparse - there's not a word wasted and it left me wanting to read it again soon.

CATCH HER IN THE RYE, 26 Jan 2008
This novel was new when I first picked it up for a train journey. I had been reading a good deal about Muriel Spark in newspaper notices at the time, so this was the chance to find out for myself. It was love at first read, and I was curious whether the wonder of it all might have survived the decades.

Muriel Spark's work is commonly classified as `satire', and I suppose that's fair. However something that her early admirers, including Evelyn Waugh, stressed was that she is not really like anyone else, and I believe that is true also. Obviously, satire has contemporary themes, so it might seem a likely candidate for early obsolescence, but a few moments' thought suggests otherwise. Juvenal Voltaire Swift and Macaulay have not exactly gone out of fashion, and are still read with enjoyment by people who cannot be bothered to look up their contemporary allusions, and 40 or more years after it was launched the satirical magazine Private Eye seems not only to be still going strong but to have passed on its special vocabulary, originally attached to figures now little remembered, to a new generation of fans. Small wonder in that case that Mrs Spark is still wearing well.

For newcomers to the author, this is as good an introduction as any. It is completely characteristic of her, it does not threaten memory overload with a huge cast of characters as The Bachelors possibly does, it stops short of being downright weird like The Hothouse by the East River, but on the other hand it escapes being lightweight like The Abbess of Crewe or even the immortal Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Of the standard Spark features, Catholicism is relegated to a brief mention, of much the usual kind, in the last page or two, but two of the characters, including the principal character (hardly qualifying as any `hero') are Scots. Her ear is as acute as ever, and readers old enough to remember the fashion for addressing people with rhyming animal names (`See you later, alligator.' `In a while, crocodile.' etc) must smile at the way the thing is done here.

The book evokes an era, and one that I remember quite well. This was the impoverished post-war Britain of dull clothes and duller food, before we first swang in the Swinging Sixties. Small manufacturing companies were still common, and it was still common for them to be British-owned and managed before automation, globalisation, the EU, MBA's and consultant-speak set in. Mrs Spark is a talented observer and mimic, and as usual there is little or no sense of affection for, or between, any of her characters. She is funny in a wry way rather than any aisles-rolled-in way, and as usual you never quite know where you are with her. Situations can become serious and even lethal in the proverbial twinkling of an optic, and one of her dramatis personae in this book is murdered and there is another attempt at murder or at least serious assault.

There is