From the Marcia Blaine Academy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to the May of Teck Club beloved of The Girls of Slender Means; from the Maud Long Medical Ward, the home to a cantankerous group of elderly inmates in Memento Mori, to the surprisingly worldly religious house overseen by The Abbess of Crewe - Muriel Spark has always been good on institutional life and the eccentricities it cultivates and conceals. Another unusual institution is depicted in the latest - but, she assures us, not the last - novel from this still sprightly, still hugely entertaining 86-year-old. College Sunrise is a school on the move. Lately of Brussels, Vienna and Lausanne, it is now instilling knowledge into nine young pupils, of various nationalities, on the shores of a Swiss lake.

"When you finish at College Sunrise you should be really and truly finished," says co-owner Nina Parker, who dispenses advice with the same eagerness as the delightful editor Mrs Hawkins in A Far Cry From Kensington, my favourite of Spark's many novels. (That it is unnecessary for men to rise when a woman enters a room is asserted by both characters.) But it is the teaching activities of Nina's husband and business partner Rowland Mahler that are at the heart of the novel. A novelist-in-the-making himself, he runs the creative writing course, on which the school's newest pupil soon starts to prove himself a star. Confident, good-looking, successful with girls, 17-year-old Chris is also well on with his first book - a fact which drives Rowland, whose own work is stalled, into paroxysms of jealousy.

Jealousy, with its associated vice envy, comes to be the major theme of the novel (as it is, indeed, in Chris's own work which deals with lust and revenge at the court of Mary Queen of Scots). As ever with Dame Muriel, the prose is taut and spare, with jokes - some fairly ribald - scattered liberally. (Am I alone in seeing something comic in the name of the visiting lecturer, Dr Shattard?) There is wonderful poetry, too - sometimes from unlikely sources. The book ends brilliantly with a line (also heard earlier) from a TV weather girl: "As we go through this evening and into tonight . . ." (A similar device was used, incidentally, by Anthony Burgess in his novel The End of the World News.) Let us pray that for Dame Muriel tonight is long in coming.

Christopher Gray