This debut novel is an Agatha Christie type mystery with a charismatic teacher as the central figure. Impressionable young minds in thrall to a teacher seems to be a somewhat common theme in books I’ve recently read. The narrator, first-year student Jess Walker, has given up a chance at an Oxbridge education to attend one of the newer universities established in industrial areas of Great Britain in the sixties. She is studying English in East Anglia because she has been so impressed a book, “The Truants,” by Lorna Clay, who teaches there. Lorna, as everyone calls her, lectures on the works of Agatha Christie and is an expert on the author, who was a bit of a mystery herself. Not long after Christie’s “The murder of Roger Ackroyd” was published, and at the height of her fame, she disappeared for almost two weeks. Police throughout England frantically searched for her. She reappeared at a hotel 11 days afterwards claiming to remember nothing. Disappearances feature in Weinberg’s novel, as well as unreliable characters like Roger Ackroyd. Jess falls in with three other Lorna acolytes, Georgie, an aristocratic girl with a penchant for drugs; Nick, a geology major of Indian ethnicity (and the most “grounded” so to speak of the three); and the somewhat older Alec, a journalist from South Africa, who is visiting because of an earlier connection with Lorna. Various triangles, romantic and otherwise, form among the characters as they all vie for Lorna’s attention. Eventually, one of them will die. Fun and well-written. 311 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment