A shocking video shapes lives forever in this elegant and addictive novel, writes Vanessa Curtis
Little, Brown, £14.99IF Zoë Heller hadn't already used the title Notes On A Scandal, it would have suited this novel about a scandalous event at a New England boarding school to perfection. Using a narrative that switches between
past and present; first, second and third person; pupil, teacher and parent; Shreve presents her own 'notes' to convey the ripples of shock that spread outwards to reel in the friends and relatives of the boys and the girl involved.
Shreve chooses to reveal the events of that fated night via videotape watched by the disbelieving headmaster, Mike Bordwin, ensuring that the reader shares his every sensation of shock and devastation at close hand. The events that he witnesses replay themselves on a loop in his head from that moment on, adding a claustrophobic and obsessive feel to the novel.
Mike, headmaster at the prestigious Avery Academy at the time the scandal breaks, is the main protagonist in this novel, along with Silas Quinney, a promising sports student who has just found true love with music student Noelle. But Mike is no innocent bystander. We learn that it is he who persuaded Silas's mother to send her son to Avery Academy, only to begin an affair with her, leading Silas to take part in the irrational and reckless sex act that forms the heart of this novel.
Shreve sheds her light upon what really happened by allowing tiny bits of information to leak through here and there. At first the culprits appear to be the boys who took part in the filmed activities, but gradually Shreve extends her narrative backwards in time, peeling away layers of family disharmony, delving into the past to show frayed marriages, breakdowns in communication and private worlds of disillusionment which affect and influence each boy in turn until they lose control of their own behaviour.
Only at the end of this gripping novel is revealed what truly happened on the night of the scandal via a written 'testimony' from one of the boys involved.
Shreve's prose is spare and powerful, and she excels in showing how two people might perceive and interpret the same event in a contrasting way. Rob, one of the students involved in the scandal, states in his confession that "truly, I don't think anyone's life was ruined", whereas the ex-headmaster, Mike Bordwin, sums up the terrible fallout of the scandal as "carnage. One boy dead. Two boys expelled. Two college opportunities missed. One girl brokenhearted. One girl gone to ground, reinventing herself (or trying to, he had heard). Two divorces. One marriage hollowed out, empty. Two mothers devastated. Another mother numb. A father who had lost both his son and his wife. A school saddled with a bad reputation. A school in its death throes. A school ripped apart."
Overall this novel is as chilly as the deep snow which coats the farmland belonging to Silas's parents. It's difficult to feel empathy for any of the main characters. Mike is obsessed with the school and the students – he prides himself on noticing "the darker side of adolescents: the insane risks they took; the experimentation with all forms of behaviour, including the obsequious".
His messy and selfish wife, Meg, barely speaks to him, looking for ways out of their marriage, and trying, as her biological clock ticks away, to force parenthood upon him. The 'victim' of the sexual assault, Sienna, is in reality a devious and manipulative girl more interested in clothes than feelings. Silas's father, Owen, is silent, remaining remote from his wife Anna, turning up at his son's school dressed in dirty farm clothes.
Only two characters evoke any real pity: Silas, the innocent victim of his parents' dead marriage and his mother's affair; and his loyal girlfriend Noelle, left alone at the end of the novel to wonder in grief "whether it is possible to keep a person alive in your thoughts and imaginings".
Events take such a tragic turn that the reader shares Mike's retrospective wish that he had "slipped the offensive tape into a pot of boiling water". But then this elegant, addictive novel about the way our lives can be shaped forever by one event wouldn't exist.
The full article contains 723 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
