Book reviews: George Orwell and Muriel Spark

Reviewing all the books I read in a year is a nice record of my reading habits but hard to keep up with the amount of books I seem to get through! Without further ado, here are the latest two to be reviewed…

Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark

Animal Farm, by George Orwell
First published by Secker & Warburg, 1945
This edition published by Penguin, 1973

Books that were on the school curriculum suffered as much as I did from forced reading. I still shudder when thinking of metaphysical poetry, for example. But slowly I am returning to the fiction made dusty in classrooms, and this is one of them – George Orwell’s ‘fairy story’ of a tainted revolution.

The book’s premise is achingly simple and oh-so clever. The animals stage a coup and drive out the farmer, proposing to work for themselves. Their success hides the fact someone has to be the leader, a mantle assumed by the pigs, and over time a terrible transformation takes place.

This is the sort of fairy story of which the Grimm brothers would have been proud. Each animal has a role that reflects our society – whether it is the honest everyman of Boxer the horse or the blind obedience of the sheep. It’s not a mirror one cares to linger in front of for too long in fear of what you may see.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, presume 1961
This edition published by Penguin, 1969

This is a fascinating story of a woman teacher desperate to make an impression, to appear cultured and charming, and the impressionable girls who she taught at school. We are told early on that one of ‘the Brodie set’ betrayed her by bringing about her dismissal as a teacher. But which one?

Is Miss Jean Brodie in her prime? You’d never know from the prose. It’s only repeated about a hundred times, but Muriel Spark likes to hang tags on her cast of characters and invokes them with nearly every mention. In this way the characters become slightly two-dimensional as we only ever see one trait – Sandy’s small peering eyes, Rose ‘famous for sex’. But knowing one trait opens our eyes to details that surround the characters - 1930s Edinburgh, the era preluding the Second World War.

The novel unfolds making good use of prolepsis / flash forward – this technique allows us to know events before they happened and gives a sense of fatality to the story even before we pass the first chapter. But what we lose with suspense we gain with attention to detail, and try to pick up on clues as to why the story unfolds like it does. At first Miss Brodie’s influence over ‘her girls’ seems beneficial but as they grow older it is revealed as manipulation.

Incidentally, great cover, isn't it? It shows Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie in the 1969 film, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.