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GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS
by Joanne Harris
William Morrow, January 2006
432 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0060559144


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Joanne Harris is best known for the rich and lush novel CHOCOLAT, set in rural France. I enjoyed that, accompanied by lots of dribbling at the descriptions of the chocolate, but nothing she has written since has come near to it. GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS will change that.

It's set in a present-day English private school, complete with all the tradition, history and class divisions that these establishments tend to drag along with them. Not everyone is so enamoured of the school, though, and sets out to destroy it from within -- and they're willing to murder if necessary.

I always worry when writers get compared to Patricia Highsmith. No one in my view can rival the fantastic Ripley series. So don't take any notice of the blurbs comparing Harris to one of crime fiction's greats. Instead, enjoy a book which has some of the most vivid characterisation I've read in a while -- this is a staff room where you feel like you know each of the inhabitants.

Harris's two finest creations in GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS are classics teacher Roy Straitley and Pat Bishop, the hearty, do anything for the good of the school, deputy head. Straitley is a fantastic character -- one of those teachers you remember all your life, who knows he has been stuck in a rut for 30-something years, but despite it all is wedded to tradition and habit.

He makes a worthy adversary for Snyde, the outsider who becomes an insider. And, as the chapter headings suggest, it becomes a chess game of nerves, with winner taking all and the loser likely to sacrifice more than their king.

You're unlikely to see the final twist coming. That's not to say I was totally convinced by it, mind, and that's largely to do with the fact that Snyde ends up as a fairly flat character. You never quite believe, as you do with Ripley, that the character is a sociopath, or whatever.

The book could have done with a rather more stringent edit in places -- it's a bit repetitive and there's a touch too much of the 'something's about to happen' throwaway line which had me going 'yeah, yeah, I know that, but get on with it if you don't mind!' But otherwise I was hooked and devoured the book in an afternoon. As she did with CHOCOLAT, Harris shows her ability to get inside the heads of a small community.

Oh, and a word of warning . . . The American edition has had the random spellcheck treatment -- totally useless in a book so firmly rooted in English tradition.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, December 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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