The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

 

     Set in a finishing school called College Sunrise, currently located in Switzerland but whose location changes from year to year, Muriel Spark's The Finishing School is a comic novel that reminded me of her early novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
     A married couple, Rowland and Nina Mahler, run the school while Rowland works (or mostly doesn't work) on a novel.  The school is small, unorthodox, and has exorbitant tuition.The student body consists of a group of affluent teens, including a princess of a possibly fictitious country, whose parents seem to want to get them off their hands.
     Among their nine students is Chris, a 17-year old who is writing an historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots and already has publishers interested in the work-in-progress.  Rowland immediately develops an intense jealousy of Chris and his novel.  His thoughts stray to wishing the boy would "die peacefully in his sleep."  He visualizes himself pouring green paint on Chris's bright red hair as he writes and watching it pour over the novel.  Chris is aware of Rowland's jealousy and enrolls a fellow student to keep his computer, discs, and printed pages of the novel locked away while Rowland continuously attempts to find and destroy it.
     Meanwhile, school is in session but the teachers own lives occupy them as much as teaching the students.  Rowland teaches creative writing and spends class time recording observations of Chris.  He tells Nina, "I've changed my mind about the book I'm writing.  It won't be a novel.  It will be a life study of a real person, Chris."  Nina secretly plots to leave Rowland at the end of the term but continues to teach her etiquette class (she calls it 'comme it faut'), instructing the students in how to properly eat an artichoke, the chances that a man inviting a girl to attend Ascot will be a crook, and the hazards of being too well-mannered.  Through it all the students and teachers get entangled with each other, the visiting lecturers, neighbors, and the hired help.
     The tension between Rowland and Chris intensifies and comes to a head when a publisher comes to see Chris about publishing his novel and agrees to also publish Rowland's The School Observed.  Things deteriorate from there and come to a surprising ending.
   The novel explores the themes of jealousy, ambition, and attraction.  Spark has a gift for creating eccentric but believable characters and these are briefly but vividly drawn.  It was a quick and humorous read.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but not as much a The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.


Favorite Lines:  (from Nina's 'comme il faut' class)
"First, if you, as a U.N. employee, are chased by an elephant stand still and wave a white handkerchief.  This confuses the elephant's legs."

     
- Frances