Different Class

Joanne Harris

Double Day/Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, May 14th 2016

Although best known for her modern-day fairy tale Chocolat,Joanne Harris’s bibliography spans multiple forms, ranging from essays to a Nordic fantasy series, a Dr Who novella, and even a cookbook. It is, however, in the dark art of psychological thriller that she really excels and her latest novel, Different Class is a masterful play of smoke and mirrors that will leave you guessing until the final page.

St Oswald’s Grammar may have survived its annus horribilis (detailed in the earlier novel, Gentlemen and Players) but its ongoing existence as an educational lies in the hands of newly-appointed Super-Head who, armed with the new motto Progress Through Tradition and two Crisis deputies, is tasked with resurrecting the venerable school’s reputation and dragging it into the 21^st Century.

After three decades moulding boys into men through a combination of benign neglect, firm discipline, and a solid grounding in the first declension, Latin master Ron Straitley immediately realises that the ‘through’ in this catchphrase is meant incisively rather than inclusively and regards the proposed changes – computers, cultural sensitivity, co-educational classes – with­ horror. What disturbs Strailey most, however, is the identity of the man who is driving them: former pupil and now Headmaster, Johnny Harrington. Although at St Oswald’s for only a year, Harrington was himself at the heart of an earlier scandal that threatened to bring the school to its knees twenty-four years earlier, and Straitley is convinced that the man has returned to enact his final revenge. But his attempts to undermine and expose Harrington’s true agenda threaten to reawaken the past, leaving him facing to personal demons that may undo him along with the school that he loves.

Told in the first-person present, a technique that allows Harris to carefully control the flow of information  – and disinformation –  available to the reader, the narrative shifts between 2005 and the Christmas term of 1981/2. Straitley’s voice alternates with a series of diary entries by an unidentified boy and addressed to a recipient called Mousey, who, it is soon made clear, is dead.

Many details are withheld or only obliquely alluded to, leaving ample space for imagination to provide additional details and assumptions. Not only does this make the reader an integral part of the story, it sets the stage for a series of revelations that, despite the cover’s spoiler description of Different Class as ‘a masterpiece of misdirection’, still come as a complete surprise.

But the real strength of the novel is not the plot, as clever as it is, but the picture it paints of the school, its pupils, and the Latin master for whom teaching and ‘his boys’ mean everything. There is an underlying honesty and affection in Harris’s portrayal that reflects the fact that she herself spent many years as a teacher. I have not yet read Gentlemen and Players, the details of which are merely hinted at here, and Harris admits she is likely to revisit the school in the future. I look forward to continuing my own acquaintance the honourable Straitley and St Oswald’s Grammar.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/masterful-play-smoke-and-mirrors