Quasimodo
Gentlemen and Players
St Oswald’s is a select private school for boys in the north of England. An air of privilege and mystery surrounds and protects this august establishment with its giant sign:
NO TRESPASSERS
NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT
BY ORDER
It forms a wonderful setting for Joanne Harris‘ book, Gentlemen and Players, which I’ve had on my shelves for ages and only just got around to reading. We had one beautiful hot and sunny day on Tuesday this week and I simply couldn’t bear to waste it indoors (after all this might just turnout to be our summer), so I indulged myself with a long read in the garden.
The book is divided like a chess game with the teacher as a white king and the adversary as a black pawn, each moving cautiously across the chequered board, the events of fifteen years earlier colouring the experience of the present, and driving them both towards a fearful and tense chapter of consequences.
The white king
Ex-Head of Classics, Roy Straitley, ‘once in charge of a thriving section of respectful menials’, now a department in himself, ‘relegated to a dusty corner of the new Languages section, like a rather dull first edition no one quite dares to throw away’, is approaching his sixty-fifth birthday and his hundredth term teaching there.
Straitley is an eccentric bachelor who’s devoted his life to this school. He is under no illusions, describing himself as ‘about as unsightly … as you’re likely to find out of captivity‘, aware of the boys’ nickname for him: ‘Quaz‘ – short for Quasimodo in his Bell Tower. But he knows too, that ‘his boys‘ respect and admire him, and hold him in real affection. He’s finding the prospect of imminent retirement daunting, but is beginning to accept that the new world of paperwork and Information Technology is leaving him too far behind. Boys though, he understands, and his skill with maintaining order and extending pastoral care is legendary.
The black pawn
Aged nine, the adversary, then an under-privileged child, gazed with curiosity and longing at the huge sign which put St Oswald’s out of bounds for all except the chosen ones whose parents could afford its advantages.
Nevertheless the desire to be part of this elite society was strong enough to drive the pawn child to extraordinary lengths to be accepted and noticed.
AlI I wanted, you see, was to belong. Abbey Road Juniors had been shabby and rundown, a failing tribute to sixties liberalism. But Sunnybank Park was infinitely worse. I took regular beatings for my leather briefcase (everyone that year was carrying Adidas bags); for my contempt of sports; for my smart mouth; for my love of books; for my clothes; and for the fact that my father worked at that posh school (it didn’t seem to matter that he was only the caretaker).
The young Julian Pinchbeck, in his stolen or appropriated uniform, was astonished at how easily this coveted world could be infiltrated, wandering the corridors unchallenged, unearthing secrets, learning hiding places, befriending loners, and hoodwinking teachers, all with a ‘feeling of delicious trespass‘. As he grew bolder so he came to realise that amongst 1,000 boys all dressed alike, ‘my face was nondescript to the point of invisibility.’ He dared more and the air of ‘genteel decrepitude‘ which ‘whispers tradition to the fee-paying parents‘ offered a highly respectable backdrop for an increasingly bizarre masquerade.
From the outset we know that the black pawn – whether nine or twenty-four – is testing boundaries and has little respect for authority and rules:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s this; that murder is really no big deal. It’s just a boundary, meaningless and arbitrary as all others – a line drawn in the dirt. Like the giant NO TRESPASSERS sign on the drive to St Oswald’s, straddling the air like a sentinel.
When the student becomes a teacher in the same school fifteen years later, the past sets a scene for an even more macabre and fiendish series of events, driven by revenge, which lead to tragedy and threaten to bring the school to its knees.
This book is most cleverly plotted and structured. The author has a mastery of language – I loved ‘Mrs Knight swept out in a fusillade of heels‘, and ‘the November wind snickering and sobbing along the broad boulevard‘. She also conveys an understanding of the world of teaching (she taught modern languages in a boys’ independent school for 15 years herself) which lends a satisfying sense of authenticity. One feels safe in her hands. She beautifully captures the petty rivalries and disputes, the power struggles and crises of school life – both amongst the boys and in the staff Common Room. She gently mocks the language of tradition – the Refectory, the Honours Board, Old Centurions, the Third Master. She doesn’t bother to translate her Latin phrases; Mr Straitley, ‘Sir‘, wouldn’t have done so. She alludes to classic events and characters without explanation: at St Oswald’s such references would be part of the inheritance of all its properly educated boys.
It’s hard to review this book without inadvertently giving away too much, so I won’t do much more than say it’s well worth reading for yourself. It’s a psychological thriller but it doesn’t drag the soul down into dark depressing places. It’s a tale of obsession and revenge, but it carries the reader along on an entertaining and often humorous journey. It keeps a twist in the tale secret till the end, so cunningly devised indeed that I didn’t guess it until a few pages before Straitley. But once I knew it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and revel in the skill which had allowed Harris to write so clearly and engagingly without revealing such a fundamental truth.
Masterly, rich in character, and thoroughly engaging. And much better than her foody books, in my opinion.