The Finishing School by Muriel Spark
"The Finishing School" is the final novel by Muriel Spark, showcasing her skill in satirical comedy. The narrative centers on College Sunrise, a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where affluent parents send their children, believing they will acquire essential knowledge. However, the school's founders, Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina Parker, are primarily motivated by profit, with Rowland struggling to produce meaningful work despite his position as a creative writing instructor. As he faces writer's block, the plot thickens with the emergence of Chris Wiley, a talented eighteen-year-old student who is making strides on his own novel. Rowland's jealousy towards Chris evolves into an obsession, intertwining themes of ambition, desire, and rivalry. Spark employs a limited omniscient narrative style, revealing the inner thoughts and hidden motivations of her characters, including their personal deceptions and aspirations. The novel explores themes related to the seven deadly sins, illustrating how individuals can mislead themselves and others. Through her incisive observations, Spark aims to challenge readers to recognize their own follies and the complexities of human relationships.
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The Finishing School by Muriel Spark
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 2004
Type of work: Novel
The Work
In her final novel, The Finishing School, Spark again demonstrated her gift for satirical comedy. The targets of her satire are the proprietors of College Sunrise, a school temporarily based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the teenage students whose well-to-do parents deposit them there, mistakenly assuming that their offspring will emerge with a store of useful knowledge. What the parents do not know is that Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina Parker, have set up the school purely as a moneymaking project. Though he teaches creative writing with authority, at twenty-nine Rowland has not yet published anything of note. However, with their income from the school, which is actually run by his long-suffering wife, he has no need to work. At last he has time to finish the great novel he is sure he has within him. Unfortunately, Rowland finds that he cannot write it: He has developed a severe case of writer’s block.
Eighteen-year-old Chris Wiley, who is one of Rowland’s creative writing students, has no such problem. He is moving right along with a novel about Mary, Queen of Scots, and despite the author’s inexperience and his cavalier attitude toward historical fact, he is already being contacted by potential publishers. Rowland’s jealousy of the younger writer, intensified by his unacknowledged sexual feelings for him, rapidly develops into an obsession so overwhelming that Rowland can think of nothing but killing his rival.
Such a plotline could well fit a tragedy or one of the darker mysteries. However, like traditional satirists, Spark is at least as interested in exposing folly and pretense as she is in pointing out instances of vice. Adopting the posture of limited omniscience, she moves from mind to mind, recording the random thoughts of her characters and thus revealing their secret selves. For example, while Nina appears to be totally devoted to her husband and his goal, she envisions a future without him. It is hardly surprising that she ends up in London with an art gallery owner, Israel Brown, whom she met in Lausanne. Chris, too, has thoughts he does not share. Not only does he sense Rowland’s sexual interest in him but he even discovers that the tension between them is essential to his own creativity. Even minor characters in The Finishing School have secret impulses. Dr. Alice Barclay-Good, a sixty-year-old guest lecturer, responds with professorial dignity to Chris’s questions about Mary, Queen of Scots, her special interest. Later Chris comes to her room to compliment her and to continue the discussion. By the time he slips into bed with her, her mind is on his red hair and his youth, and nothing else matters.
Though in keeping with Spark’s Catholic perspective, The Finishing School presents examples of all the seven deadly sins, the author approaches her subject by pointing out that human beings fall into sin by deceiving others and deceiving themselves. Like the great satirists who preceded her, she knows that the surest way to reform others is to show them their own errors in the follies of others.
Review Sources
Booklist 100, no. 21 (July 1, 2004): 1800.
Kirkus Reviews 72, no. 14 (July 15, 2004): 658.
Library Journal 129, no. 13 (August 15, 2004): 70.
Ms. 14, no. 3 (Fall, 2004): 87.
The New York Review of Books 51, no. 18 (November 18, 2004): 21.
The New York Times, October 8, 2004, p. E41.
The New York Times Book Review 154 (September 19, 2004): 26.
People 62, no. 17 (October 25, 2004): 55.
Publishers Weekly 251, no. 33 (August 16, 2004): 42.
The Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 2004, p. 21.