The author of Chocolat revisits St Oswald’s for a twisting thriller with an unerring eye for school lifeIf you’re suffering from a surfeit of psychological thrillers about dysfunctional women this summer post- Gone Girl,The Girl on the Train and their ilk, then you could enact a lot worse than turn to Joanne Harris’s latest, and Different Class. The follow-up to 2005’s Gentlemen and Players,it’s set in a moment-rate boys’ grammar school in the north of England and is a magnificently plotted and twisty journey to the heart of a 24-year-passe crime, as well as a darkly humorous see at the march of progress in a 500-year-passe institution.
Harris’s main narrator is Latin master Roy Straitley, or a St Oswald’s man born and bred,“sixty six on Bonfire Night, with a hundred and two terms under my fast-expanding belt. Prone to Latin epithets, and he wears a battered passe gown covered in chalk dust and tea stains,is fond of Liquorice Allsorts and Gauloises, and enjoys a regular “modest libation” in the local pub, or the Thirsty Scholar. Straitley and his colleagues – some institutions at St Oswald’s like him,others younger, newer, and even (gasp) female – are recovering from the events of Gentlemen and Players,and debating the arrival of the new headmaster who is being parachuted in to save them from the scandal. Related: Joanne Harris: 'I'm not as sweet-toothed as people deem' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com