Schooling Book

Heather McGowan's Schooling is vivid, anguished and compelling, as she focuses on Catrine's experiences at her father's old English boarding school, where she goes when her American mother dies and her Welsh father returns with her to Britain. McGowan enters not only Catrine's thoughts, but also those of her peers, her teachers and her father. She interleaves within the narrative structure myriad voices through such tropes as a play on words, a play on plays (Hamlet; Aristophanes' The Birds) and an unexpected first-person short story. The impression of a constant shift of perspective deceives the reader into frequently casting Catrine on the sidelines, one player among many, and yet she also acts as narrator, reading and recording the minds of those she encounters. Action and thought intersect closely; everyday speech from her teachers and school friends is recorded alongside her fears and emotions, sometimes within one sentence, so that the subject moves from her to her Chemistry teacher to her friend in America. Although Schooling is a novel that is rightly fêted for its stream-of-consciousness narrative, it contains many incidents that would aptly fit in any boarding-school story and which make absorbing reading: smoking surreptitiously, bullying, sniffing glue, putting on a school play, punishment for "indecent" photographs, minor arson. These incidents are purely that, though--incidental to the main story. They emerge sometimes startlingly through the thick, heady fug of Catrine's relationship with her Chemistry teacher, which is cast beautifully and poetically as innocent and all-enveloping. The denouement of the tale perhaps should be expected, despite the timeless feel of the novel, but it is orchestrated feelingly. McGowan has written a compulsive account of adolescence that moves and grips the reader while stirring sometimes unwanted memories of being 14 and at school. --Olivia DickinsonRead More