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.