Shuttlecock – Graham Swift

The narrator, Prentis, works in a small civilian unit of the police where records on redundant incomplete investigations are held pending resolution or indeed forever as the case may be. His relationship with his boss, Quinn, is strained; he suspects Quinn is setting him impossible tasks, to find links and connections that don’t exist - to test him or to break him. Bear in mind this is the 1980’s so this work involves paper records and requires clerical and mental dexterity.

Relationships at home are no better. He is a bully to his wife and two sons. He imposes his will and gets sullen obedience in return. One bone of contention is his refusal to take them out on Sundays; instead, he visits his institutionalised father who has suddenly become mute after a breakdown.

That is another complicated relationship. His father was always a distant figure and much of what Prentis knows of him he has gleaned from an autobiographical account of his WWII exploits as an agent and then a prisoner in occupied France.

Things build to a head as the older son flexes his adolescent independence. Prentis finds himself between a father who won’t speak and a son who won’t listen. However, his boss eventually opens up and takes Prentis into his confidence about the work he has been set. Prentis will have to face up to some stark choices.

The portrayal of the decidedly odd character of Prentiss is well done. His self-centred view of the world is made to make sense no matter how distasteful his actions. The father-son dynamics are explored with perceptiveness. And though Prentis’s life is short on action and adventure, there is plenty of that in the extensive extracts from his father’s wartime account.

It is concise at just over two hundred pages, and though published in 1981 it does not seem dated in style. In summary, a curious period piece.

Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood creates this novel around the real life story of Grace Marks who was convicted in Canada in 1843, along with fellow servant James McDermott, of the murder of their employer Thomas Kinnear and housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Grace was only sixteen years old at the time (McDermott was older) and some clemency was applied sparing her the gallows for life imprisonment.

By 1859, Grace has been in and out of an asylum and holds a trustee position in the penitentiary, regularly allowed to serve in the Governor’s household. There is a body of opinion that maintains her innocence, claiming she was an innocent and unwilling accomplice to McDermott, involved against her will. Others see her as the evil and manipulative driver of the crime. 

Enter Dr Simon Jordan, a young physician specialising in the diseases of the mind, full of modern ideas from Europe and ambitions to set up his own, forward-thinking institution. It his through his interviews with Grace that her full story unfolds. Or at least her version of it; can Dr Jordan, and the reader through him, believe all she says? 

Meanwhile Dr Jordan has his own issues to deal with as a genteel but impoverished young professional susceptible to feminine charms, be they from Grace, the governor’s daughters or his distressed landlady.

Grace gives him the story of her childhood emigration from Ireland, her separation from her family, and her early employment as a servant girl. In that first job she makes and loses a friend in traumatic circumstance that could be significant in her subsequent actions. Those actions, too, are eventually related in their full horror. Dr Jordan’s exploits between sessions with Grace add colour and light relief while also heightening the tension. 

It is all beautifully written, leaving much for the reader to ponder, filter the ambiguities and come to their own conclusion on Grace’s guilt or otherwise. One clear verdict is that it is a very good read.

Different Class – Joanne Harris

It is September 2005, a new term at St Oswald’s Grammar School, and veteran Latin teacher Roy Straitley is bracing himself for changes. The events of the previous academic year (covered in a previous book) has led to the installation of a new head teacher and his ‘turnaround’ team, full of buzz words, policies and strategies that are anathema to an old stick like Roy. He’s been at St Oswald’s, pupil and master, thirty-four years and has seen it all before.

 The new head is also an old boy, and that brings back memories to Roy of the events of 1981 when the new head was briefly a pupil. It was another problematic year for the school when a charismatic colleague of Roy’s was hounded out of his job after three boys caused him trouble. And now that old colleague has died and, to Roy’s dismay, is refused a memorial in the school chapel for fear of resurrecting the scandal.

 One of the boys recorded the events of 1981 in a diary and snippets of it are revealed throughout the book though, as nicknames are used, identities remain uncertain.

The 1981 diary, Roy’s memories of that year, and the trials of teaching under current ‘turnaround’ conditions progress to their respective climaxes. It is no surprise, or spoiler, to find that they are all connected; but the who’s and how’s remain pleasingly obscured to the end.

It is atmospherically, almost claustrophobically, written with events all taking place in or around the school premises, past and present. This is a different side to Joanne Harris; no summery rural French idyll here, it is autumnal, suburban and stifled Englishness.

 This is the third (though the first I have read) book in the St Oswald’s series and despite several references back it stands alone well enough. Enjoyable without sending me scurrying to read the earlier two.