The Finishing School – Muriel Spark (2004)

In 2018, I started the #readingMuriel2018 reading challenge – and during that year read an awful lot of Muriel Spark – though I didn’t manage everything she wrote. I had fully intended to read The Finishing School at the end of that year of reading, as it was her final novel. However, it has sat on my tbr along with at least one other Spark novel that I bought to read in 2018 but didn’t manage to get to.

In her introduction to this edition, poet Jackie Kay describes this novel which was written when Muriel Spark was eighty-six as a comic and satirical swansong. It is a novel about passion and creative jealously, beginnings and endings, writing fiction, reality and imagination. It is interesting to note that in Muriel Spark’s first novel The Comforters the central character is a writer who begins to hear a typewriter tapping out the words she speaks or thinks. In The Finishing School we meet two writers, one of them, a student at the school is apparently turning out some potentially brilliant stuff at quite a rate, while the other, a teacher, is seriously blocked. The other Spark novel one can’t help but recall is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – where another teacher has an enormous impact on her young students.  

“‘You begin’ he said ‘by setting your scene. You have to see your scene either in reality or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can’t see across the lake, it’s too misty. You can’t see the other side.’ Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative writing class whose parents’ money was being thus spent…”

The Finishing school of the title is College Sunrise, currently located in Ouchy on the edge of Lake Geneva. The school is run by Rowland and Nina Mahler, the school is peripatetic, moving around Europe, a different place each year leaving a few debts in their wake. The couple support themselves with what they make from the school as Rowland struggles to write his novel. Rowland teaches the creative process, while Nina teaches other more frivolous aspects of life.

“When you finish at College Sunrise you should be really and truly finished,” Nina told the girls. “Like the finish on a rare piece of furniture. Your jumped-up parents (may God preserve their bank accounts) will want to see something for their money.”

This year they have nine students – all from different privileged backgrounds, a mixture of nationalities they all seem to be in their late teens. We don’t really get to know these students in any meaningful way, and what we do see is not always likeable. Chris Wiley is one of them, at almost eighteen he is already writing his first novel about Mary Queen of Scots, unconcerned that she has been written about many times before, he is confident he can bring something new to the story. Chris starts to seek out new angles to the story of the Queen and the story of Darnley’s murder. Rowland who is struggling with his own writing becomes very irritated by Chris’s burgeoning success.

Chris has one of his fellow students keep his computer and discs in her room, away from prying eyes. It soon become obvious to everyone that Rowland is especially bothered by Chris and his writing – and the reader starts to wonder how far his creative jealousy and rivalry will push him. Rowland watches Chris, riffles through his bag – and in the end begins to write his observations of Chris into his own novel.

Meanwhile Nina is becoming more and more aware that her marriage is probably over, Rowland is more married to his novel she thinks than to her. She begins an affair.

“‘Do you find,’ said Rowland to Chris, ‘that at a certain point your characters are taking over and living a life of their own?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Chris said.

‘I mean once you have created the characters, don’t you sort of dream of them or really dream of them so that they come to you and say ‘Hey, I didn’t say that.’

‘No’ said Chris.

Rowland’s jealousy begins to get a little out of hand, as does Chris’s attempts to thwart him. A publisher begins to take some interest in Chris – more attracted it seems by his age than his actual writing.

In the Finishing School Spark is as clear sighted as ever – she knows what she wants to say, and in it we see many of the preoccupations from her earlier novels. In the title it is tempting to see Spark having another little laugh, perhaps knowing this would be her final novel, although I did read somewhere that when she died a couple of years later she had another unfinished novel in progress. The Finishing School is witty and satirical and has been described (so I’m told) as the perfect partner to her famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.