Machiavelli at school
Digby Durrant
NORTH by Brian Martin
Macmillan New Writing, £12.99, pp. 247, ISBN 0230000002
✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 North, the eponymous sophisticated and cultured AngloAmerican adolescent who charms the pants off everyone he meets, often literally, is a pupil at a liberal school in Oxford. The English master, an authority on Milton, is particularly bowled over when North declares Paradise Lost to be his bible. He slips into the role of mentor, moved perhaps by the boy’s habit of kissing him on both cheeks when they meet, which raises eyebrows but impresses with its casual elegance. North does more than raise eyebrows when he invites his attractive history teacher, Bernie, to lunch and not as she had thought to discuss the Vienna Settlement. Already a sense of secrecy, unease and displacement comes off this book, something more sinister than the mere scandal of an unseemly love affair. This disorientation is subtly fanned by Brian Martin, who refuses to tells us whether North is a surname or Christian name; and the English teacher who remains merely ‘I’.
North and Bernie soon become lovers. Teachers and pupils falling in love is an increasingly prevalent theme these days and almost invariably it ends in tears, as it does in both Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. The consequences of it in this book are equally disastrous and far-reaching. It starts with Monty Ross, the physics teacher, who is particularly inflamed by North’s success with Bernie. An evangelical Christian and happily married, whose wife is about to give birth, he makes it clear he wants Bernie for himself. North’s seemingly out rageous idea for mollifying Monty is to seduce him. When he confides this plan to his mentor he’s met, of course, by kneejerk professions of astonishment and dismay. But beyond these few bleats which he knows will be ignored, the man does little to dissuade North from his plan and, far from being the friend and guide, he stands revealed as a lecherous and hypocritical voyeur.
North, Monty and Bernie go with a group to a poetry festival at Ravello, a place where love may be said to be in the air. On the minibus North inserts himself between Bernie and Monty and contrives to hold her hand throughout the journey while pressing his leg against Monty’s, who responds, and an affair as obvious as the one with Bernie begins. It’s difficult not to admire his footwork in every sense of the word.
Far more is to come, much of it teetering and collapsing into knockabout farce before it turns into a tragedy that wrecks the school’s reputation, ruins its ambitious and capable headmaster, causes a suicide attempt, a broken marriage, raucous public scenes and finally a mysterious and violent death; all of it the handiwork of North, the appalling youth who, with a touch of hyperbole not altogether inappropriate for this highly melodramatic book, combines the looks of Dorian Gray and the evil of Iago with the same passion to bring about the downfall of others that recalls Laclos’ Liaisons Dangéreuses. Unfortunately, though the ending is horrible, it leaves the creepy authority on Paradise Lost unscathed. People like him never get their just deserts.
North is one of six first novels to be published by Macmillan’s New Writing, a project that has had many brickbats showered upon it, the Guardian calling it ‘Ryanair publishing’. Despite all the suspension of disbelief this book demands of the reader, if the other five are as entertainingly written as Martin’s the Guardian will have to eat its words. North is elegantly printed, sturdily bound with a strikingly evocative cover and is reasonably priced. Brian Martin has waited too long to write his first book. He should give his vivid imagination another outing soon, perhaps curbing its wilder excesses and the over-abundance of literary quotes.
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