McGowan's first novel is conventional in storyline but radical in
style. The story concerns Catrine Evans, nearly 14, whose American
mother has just died of cancer. Her Welsh father decides to return
to England and send Catrine to his old private school, which now
admits girls and is thus a place where old certainties may be
called into question. Catrine, still grieving for her mother, and
also harbouring the pain of an incident in her childhood when she
and a friend apparently caused the death of a motorcyclist, finds
herself subject to different kinds of manipulation by pupils and
staff, revolving around her outsider status. Through major and
minor transgressions, particularly a nearly consummated
relationship with her Chemistry teacher, Catrine finds she has been
schooled in the compromises and bitter realities of life. However,
this is far from being a conventional school or coming-of-age
story, because of its radically subversive style. Much is Catrine's
stream-of-consciousness, but other sections skip into other
characters' minds or parody other genres such as drama. There is
cross-cutting and intertextual reference, particularly to
Shakespeare and to Aristophanes's The Birds, which is being
rehearsed at the school while Catrine is engaged in her adventures.
There is frequent reference to artificiality and playfulness. 'The
exact is never true' as one character puts it. This initially
complex narrative, with its modernist influences, such as Ulysses
and Virginia Woolf's experimental novels, and its postmodern
cross-referencing and awareness of the slipperiness of language,
gradually reveals to the reader the prismatic way the world appears
to Catrine: exciting, erotic, contradictory, easy to misinterpret
yet eventually revealing some hard-won if provisional truths.
(Kirkus UK)
Caitrin Jones, a young American, is sent to an English boarding
school after her mother dies of cancer. Thrust into an unfriendly
world and ridiculed for her American accent, Caitrin lays bare her
thoughts and feelings in a luminous stream-of-consciousness
narrative. Memories of Isabelle, the best friend she left behind in
Maine, give way to dreams haunted by images of an accidental death
she believes they caused before she left for England; newly
awakened hopes and desires interweave with the old as she gradually
adjusts to her new environment. When she begins a relationship with
her chemistry teacher, her language soars to astonishing heights;
its painful end brings forth words and images that subtly reflect
Caitlin's deeper understanding of herself and the world.
Culminating in a startling revelation, Schooling is a work of great
beauty and power, a tour de force of literary artistry, allusion
and illusion.
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