250 pages or less
Worthwhile reads to fit busy student schedules

-- Kristin Johnson, Literary Critic

A jealous obsession ends with a twist: Passionate desires are painfully obvious at a permissive boarding school
Fiction
The Finishing School
By: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, 192 pages, hardcover $16.95. September 2004.
First Thoughts: A quick read with well-played tension between characters. Witty and entertaining, The Finishing School is a gem that captures this world in a satiric microcosm.

College Sunrise is anything but sunny in this ominous look at a finishing school that changes locations with each new term. Husband and wife team, Nina Parker and Rowland Mahler, founded the small school, set initially in Switzerland and host to only nine students. Nina focuses on the administrative details and teaches an entertaining course in etiquette, while Rowland presents a popular course in creative writing as well as most of the other classes offered.

The young couple started College Sunrise so Rowland could work and still have time to complete his first novel. But when Rowland takes on a new student, redhead Chris Wiley, we find that this teacher has more to learn about himself than even he knew. He will also see how jealousy of a colleague, albeit a student in this case, can turn innocent interest into oblique obsession.

Seventeen-year-old Chris is labeled a prodigy and spends most of his time at the school writing his novel instead of attending classes. His truancy, however, is not an issue at College Sunrise, where rules are relaxed and so are attitudes toward sex and alcohol and drug use. Spark’s treatment of these topics, along with a highlighted fashion show put on by the school, is an effective satire of current attitudes.

The novel Chris is writing focuses on a new theory in the murder of Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots. When Chris shows the first few chapters to Rowland at the beginning of the term, Rowland replies “You know, Chris, I don’t think you’re on the right lines. You might scrap it and start again.”

Upon hearing Rowland’s lack of encouragement for the project, Chris becomes secretive about any further progress on the novel, and keeps the novel literally under lock and key. This secrecy sucks Rowland into an obsession that threatens to tear apart the school, his marriage and his own novel.

As if it weren’t bad enough for Rowland to watch his student proceed so swiftly through his novel while Rowland suffers from horrible writer’s block, it also happens that several publishers become interested in Chris’s work. Chris’s ease of writing and attention from publishers push Rowland over the edge. Rowland then leaves the school to find peace at a nearby monastery.

But his peace does not last. He is soon drawn back to College Sunrise to play out a fateful friendship in the unexpected conclusion of The Finishing School.

Now 86, this British author, Dame Muriel Spark, is still churning out fun and fast reads. In addition to novels, Spark is a literary critic and has completed three volumes of poetry and other works. She has been awarded two honorary degrees, one from the University of Strathclyde in 1971 and the other from the University of Edinburgh in 1989. Among her awards is the prestigious T. S. Eliot Award. The Finishing School was her 22nd novel. It is due out in paperback in April of this year.

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