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A review by jacki_f
Different Class by Joanne Harris
3.0
We're in St Oswald's, an English private grammar school in North Yorkshire, the kind that's full of years of tradition and history. Roy Straitley has been a Latin master at the school for thirty four years and is now in his mid 60s. He loves the school and is horrified when a new Headmaster arrives, full of plans to modernise St Oswald's, to introduce technology, to allow girls to attend (!) and generally to ride roughshod over 500 years of tradition.
But Roy also has personal reasons to dislike the new Head. John Harrington is a former pupil. A particularly unpleasant and scheming pupil. "The arrogant, sullen little boy has been reborn as a smiling, smooth-voiced politician," he tells us. "But people rarely change at heart, except in the growing sophistication of their various disguises, and it doesn't take much for me now to see below the surface."
What were Harrington's crimes? We will learn that gradually over the course of the novel, which is told from two perspectives: Straitley in 2005 and an anonymous narrator who was a pupil back in 1981. However the majority of the story is about Harrington's plans to modernise St Oswald's and Straitley's determination to fight him and save his own job.
It's a well written story with rich characters and lots of menace. I enjoyed being immersed in St Oswald's and the mystery of what exactly had happened to whom. There are several twists in the tale that have you smiling at their cleverness. I did feel however that the story is too stretched out and I found myself getting a bit muddled about who was who. If you strip away the fantastic writing, the plot at its heart is fairly far-fetched and silly. It's just that it's very well told.
This is a rough sequel of sorts to "Gentlemen and Players" - it's set in the same school with some of the same characters, but it's intended to also work as a standalone novel. I haven't read the first book and I didn't feel that was an issue but it does get referred to several times and you'd probably enjoy this book more if you have read it.
But Roy also has personal reasons to dislike the new Head. John Harrington is a former pupil. A particularly unpleasant and scheming pupil. "The arrogant, sullen little boy has been reborn as a smiling, smooth-voiced politician," he tells us. "But people rarely change at heart, except in the growing sophistication of their various disguises, and it doesn't take much for me now to see below the surface."
What were Harrington's crimes? We will learn that gradually over the course of the novel, which is told from two perspectives: Straitley in 2005 and an anonymous narrator who was a pupil back in 1981. However the majority of the story is about Harrington's plans to modernise St Oswald's and Straitley's determination to fight him and save his own job.
It's a well written story with rich characters and lots of menace. I enjoyed being immersed in St Oswald's and the mystery of what exactly had happened to whom. There are several twists in the tale that have you smiling at their cleverness. I did feel however that the story is too stretched out and I found myself getting a bit muddled about who was who. If you strip away the fantastic writing, the plot at its heart is fairly far-fetched and silly. It's just that it's very well told.
This is a rough sequel of sorts to "Gentlemen and Players" - it's set in the same school with some of the same characters, but it's intended to also work as a standalone novel. I haven't read the first book and I didn't feel that was an issue but it does get referred to several times and you'd probably enjoy this book more if you have read it.