 | By: Patrick Gale Binding: Paperback Publisher: HarperPerennial ISBN: 0007151047 ISBN-13: 9780007151042 Released: 02 May 2006 RRP: Average Rating:  |
He's writing about a bunch of misfits at boarding school during the 70's but life here is more 'Malllory Towers' than 'Another Country' or 'If'. The main problem is the protagonist Sophie, through who the story is told. Perhaps she should be callled 'Patrick', because this reader never fully believes that the perspective is that of a 13-year-old girl who's grown up in a care home (the language/observation is that of a 40-year-old gay man - sorry!). Would a 13-year-old reallly uses terms like 'Tudorbethan' to describe the design of a house or would she recognise that a teenage boy's aftershave is Eau Sauvage? I doubt it. What's more there's no character development to show that Sophie is the kind of girl who knows these things.
At one stage Sophie is invited to become a member of the school's exclusive society of bellringers, which is apparently akin to being part of a 'licenced hellfire club'. This is exactly the problem with the book, PG tells us this but he never shows us any evidence that it reallly is! As someone who's been to the type of school he's writing about I can assure anyone that most teenage boys or girls would prefer double detention that to have to ring bells in their spare time. It just doesn't ring true (excuse the pun)... plus it's a narrative red-herring which again is a common feature in this novel. I know Patrick is under a lot of pressure to bring out a novel on almost a yearly basis, but a bit more time & effort could have made this one a cracker ...
Themes recur as well as places: the outsider as the reference point for sanity (and often morality) & the use of a central character who is in some way freakish: Sophie, our protagonist here, has a bizarrely parent-less & yet multi-parented life & is reminiscent of Dido from A Sweet Obscurity in that though a child, she has a certain grave maturity which affects the lives of the adults around her.
These outsiders' stories may or may not carry some metaphorical representation of Gale's experiences as a gay man but what is fascinating is his ability to find the dystopic in the 'normal' & set it against the surer groundings which the freaks have managed to dredge out of their less-than-fortunate circumstances.
I've just read Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' & there are interesting comparisons: Ishiguro's narrative is also set in a boarding school, also focuses on the interplay between apparently unusual children & the adult world around them. But Gale's story is the subtler of the two in that he does the whole job with character, rather than needing to invent a sinister paralllel reality in order to provide the metaphorical underpinnings for outsider-hood.
I noted in a previous review that Gale is often compared to Joanna Trollope & Iris Murdoch. In Friendly Fire, we get a good taste of Dickens too: When Dr Harestock announces the morning hymn he 'never treated the first line as a title but read until the first full stop.' In Great Expectations, Mr. Wopsle's announcements of the psalm always involve his 'giving the whole first verse.'
Dickensian too are the wonderful illustrations by Aidan Hicks: not only are they lovely in their own right, but they can also be used by the eagle-eyed as a way of foretelling the action as each chapter begins.
You get a lot with Gale: he's clearly read everything good in English Literature & knows how to play the magpie with it. But he is never less than original even in this, his thirteenth novel. I can't think of an intelligent person I know who could fail to enjoy it & to appreciate its subtle, lingering charm.
The characters, Charlie, Lucas & Mr Compton are drawn much more convincingly than the straight ones - Sophie, Wilf & Margaret.
Overalll an enjoyable read but not the definitive seventies school novel.
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