The Finishing School [Hardcover]

The last decade has been a productive if uneven period for novelist Dame Muriel Spark, whose dynamic career in literature has now spanned over half a century. 'All The Stories of Muriel Spark' was published in 2001, 'The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark' in 2003, both 'All the Poems of Muriel Spark' and a four-novel Modern Library omnibus were published earlier this year, and an idiosyncratic selection of her older fiction is currently in print. 1996 saw the release of 'Reality and Dreams,' one of Spark's rare outright failures, and 'Aiding and Abetting' debuted in 2000. But 'Aiding and Abetting' was sketchy and insubstantial, and something of a failure as well.

Thus the good news is that 'The Finishing School' (2004), Spark's 22nd novel, is worthy of taking its place on a lower rung among her second tier works (1958's 'Robinson,' 1960's 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye,' 1968's 'The Public Image,' and 1973's 'The Hothouse By the East River,' among others).

Happily, 'The Finishing School' has a brisk tone which most resembles that of 'Territorial Rights' (1979) and the greatly underrated 'Symposium' (1990), and, like those novels, concerns itself largely with life among the wealthy and the privileged. The institution in question is Sunrise College, a mobile school in Switzerland that in any given semester has only a handful of students enrolled. Ironically, Sunrise College never seems entirely credible, and throughout feels exactly like what it is in fact: a convenient and mutable creative device for its author's use.

Nonetheless, 'The Finishing School' is a deft, if slight, meditation on creative frustration, envy, competition, and emotional displacement.

Rowland Mahler, who teaches creative writing and runs the school with his wife, Nina, is attempting to write his long-planned first novel.

But Rowland discovers that one of his young students, seventeen year-old Chris Wiley, has almost completed his own first novel on the life of Mary Queen of Scots.

Dazed and dazzled, as is everyone else, by Chris's charm, confidence, productivity, and talent, Rowland finds his own ability to write disappearing, and his lofty private image of himself as an author-to-be suffering painfully.

When plucky Chris finds a publisher with apparent ease, Rowland's thwarted creative drive switches gears, transforming into a malevolent obsession with his formerly prized pupil and friend.

'The Finishing School' glides effortlessly across its own clever and glossy surfaces, reflecting evidence of Spark's talent, but not her genius.

Spark once defended her occasionally harsh treatment of her characters by asserting that "they're just words," something certainly true of all the characters here except Rowland and Chris, who tend towards the three dimensional without ever quite arriving there.

Over the decades, the author has stated on multiple occasions that her novels are primarily intended as "entertainment," and 'The Finishing School,' a novella which casts a very short shadow, does succeed at being that.

"The Finishing School" is a thread-bare novella--a sketch, really--about jealousy and the creative process. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, operate College Sunrise, a post-secondary school which moves from one European location to another, not merely for a change in ambience but mostly to outrun the school's piling debts. While Nina manages the school, Rowland is supposed to be writing his novel, but he's suffering from an intractable case of writer's block.

To put it more accurately: "Rowland was simply going mad with jealousy about the writing of novels." One of the school's students, the handsome and popular Chris Wiley, is discovered writing his own book--a historical work about Mary, Queen of Scots. Soon enough, Chris's novel has attracted both the attention of several publishers and the murderous envy of Rowland, who whines that Chris is "trying to pass himself off as a creative writer, when all he's doing is exploiting his looks and his youth." And Chris, in turn, discovers that he is unable work on his book without the motivating presence of Rowland's jealousy.

Added to this plot are a few random descriptions of the other students (and their familial backgrounds) and some generally blithe comments about society ("it's hypocrisy that makes the world go round"), etiquette ("if you are offered a plover's egg as a snack...you want your right hand to be free to shake someone else's hand [so] your left hand should hold the plover's egg"), and liberalism in education (Nina obliges when the students want "to be reminded of what an exam was like").

The slightness of Spark's 23nd novel is more than compensated by the sharpness of its observations on creativity and competitiveness. Like other British comedies of manners, "The Finishing School" is slim of plot and of character; instead, it's a work to be savored for its conciseness, its cynicism, and its occasional mean-spiritedness.

Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina founded the College Sunrise in Ouchy, Switzerland. They are respectively 29 and 26 and they have nine students. Rowland teaches creative writing and in his spare time he aspires to become a novelist. But then his seventeen year old student Chris Wiley starts writing a novel about Mary Queen of Scots entitled "Who Killed Darnley" and Rowland suffers from writing block because he is jealous of the ease with which Chris's writing progresses. Rowland can't understand why his teenage pupil is able to write like a professional, how he can manage language so wonderfully and with so little experience. Nothing compared with his own dismal efforts at mediocre prose.

But as the reader progresses along the plot, he realises that nothing in Mrs Spark's novel is as it seems. The characters are well drawn, the scenes are often very amusing because they are laced with acute and witty observations about authors, publishers, school life, marital relationships and more generally about present day preoccupations.