The prime of Muriel Spark

BOTH THE FILM AND THE book of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie take as their starting point the girls on their bicycles outside their Edinburgh school, but the great difference follows that moment.

But it's hardly what the book does. One of the extraordinary things Muriel Spark pulled off - and it irked her that she should be remembered just for this one, while she pulled off so many other remarkable technical feats - is that the novel version is not "straightened out" at all. In fact, by any standards Muriel Spark has broken the rules of storytelling egregiously by looping back and forth, introducing characters while telling the reader straight away what will happen to them (before they have even grown out of the first form), forcing into the narrative future events, one pupil dying in a fire, another shaking off Miss Brodie's influence as a puppy shakes water out of its coat, another visiting her grave, and Sandy closeted in Miss Mackay's study (a scene the film does not get round to) and betraying Miss Brodie, after which she becomes a nun and a successful author of psychological textbooks - a transformation the film wisely does not try to include.

All these, and more, are anticipations which the novel thrusts into the main story, "spoiling" it if you see it that way. The novelist's great power - withholding information, building tension and teasing the reader's expectations - is simply bypassed when the end of the story is casually tossed in in this way. Well, hardly "casually", for few words would be less appropriate to Muriel Spark's taut, considered writing. What she is doing in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - what she did throughout her mature novels - is to redefine to her own wishes the rules of how she tells plot, how she handles time, how she uses fiction to suggest the complexity of "real life".

In the same way that Jean Brodie cautions her little girls against Miss Mackay's admiration of Stanley Baldwin ("safety first") compared to the truth and beauty of the arts of Italy, the novel as a whole looks coolly at Jean Brodie's project of transforming little girls into little women, putting old heads on young shoulders - making them in the process only little models of herself. In a world where the Cowgate festers with the ranks of the unemployed, where the brownshirts march in Germany and Mussolini's blackshirts transform Italy into a Fascist state (to Jean Brodie's uncritical acclaim) are uncritically viewed truth and beauty enough? The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie points up the gap between Miss Mackay's dry, cautious view of life, and Jean Brodie's glamorous but destructive one - one whose destructive power was obvious in the way it failed her little girls (when we are allowed to see what happened to them), and failed her, too, when the world geared up for 1939.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie could be seen to have a lot in common with Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which Hardy sardonically subtitled as a story about a "pure woman" - one who despite rape and early loss of virginity, a lost child, a failed marriage and a spell as a "kept woman" tries hard to be true to her own idea of what a "pure woman" might be. The tragedy lies in the mismatch between the world Hardy puts her in, and her desperate idea of what a "pure woman" was.

Marooned in prosaic 1930s Edinburgh, Jean Brodie and her idea of a woman in her prime, with a duty to pass on her mission to her little girls, is as cut off from reality as Tess, and her fate as pre-determined by the author. Let us enjoy the film by all means, but we do the author more justice to go back to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as Muriel Spark conceived it, a painfully convoluted, contradictory, interrupted book which tries to give some hint of the complications of being alive at an ugly time. IC