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DIFFERENT CLASS
by Joanne Harris
Touchstone, January 2017
403 pages
$26.00
ISBN: 1501155512


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

DIFFERENT CLASS by well-known and popular author Joanne Harris is not for the lazy reader. This novel is hard work. But Harris fans will already know what sort of ride they are in for and be champing at the bit to tear into it.

The genre is tricky. Most seem to categorize DIFFERENT CLASS as a psychological thriller, which in many basic ways it is, but that description is smothered in the most manipulative structure of misdirection I've come across in a very long time. Who is manipulated? The reader. What fun!

Starting with the basics, the setting is a private English boy's school in North Yorkshire roughly between the years of 1981 and 2005. It's a great setting but not a particularly original one for this drama. The characters are what we expect in this setting: a range of faculty members, mostly of long-standing at St. Oswald's, with a discouraging parade of insufficient administrators, annoying parents, physical staff from the lower social strata of the town, and a motley crew of fourteenish boy students, fourteen being a stunningly motley age. Again, not particularly original, but perfectly right.

The plot consists of the modern day struggles of a five hundred year old school to continue to exist, the tensions between the faculty and the administrators, and the frequent chasms between the adults and the boys, all packed in a stew of angst, maybe homosexual and maybe not, cruelty to humans and to animals, and some murders. Again, not original but right. In fact, this pretty much describes British schoolboy novels of the last fifty years.

Ho hum? I think not. For the originality of author Harris lies in her level of misdirection. This is four hundred pages of nobody ever letting the reader know anything much (but most of them do know a bunch) except in little dribbles of confusing information slipped out of the minds of thirty year faculty member Latin master Roy Straitley and a boy diarist. Straitley's observations, thoughts, conversations, and experiences unfold through a series of short chapters dealing with what is happening at St. Oswald's in 2005 and another series of short chapters of what he remembers from 1981. These sets of chapters are in order but they are mixed together so that the reader is constantly flipping back and forth between 2005 and 1981 and trying to sort out what is being presented. Sorting out is hard. Remembering is harder.

And remembering is doubly hard because there is another pair of series of short chapters dealing with St. Oswald's in 2005 and in 1981 which are also in order but mixed between the two timeframes. These are by the student narrator. They are also thoroughly mixed with the two series of Straitley's narratives.

Are you with me so far? There's more.

Straitley's narratives are fairly straightforward (maybe that explains his surname). However, although we are quickly focused on three 1981 boy students, new boys who cling to each other as they try to fit in, and we are told their names – Johnny Harrington, Charlie Nutter, and David Spikely – often these boys are referred to by their nicknames – Ziggy, Goldie, and Poodle. One of these three boys is the student diarist narrator. His nickname is Ziggy. We just don't know which nickname goes with which boy.

By now the reader is so grateful that the setting, characters, and plot are the standard fare. There's only so much a reader can be expected to cope with. Jumping back and forth every few pages between now and then and at the same time between two narrators, one unidentified, is plenty.

This novel is a piece of work for the author obviously – how did she manage to twist so much together and keep track of it? – and it is also a piece of delicious work for the reader. I read mysteries for fun. I review mysteries. I was reduced to taking notes. Harris is amazing.

§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.

Reviewed by Diana Borse, January 2017

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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