James Harpur entered a boy's boarding school in the 1970s and
survived to tell the tale. His sequence of poems is a searingly
honest and compelling account of his five-year journey, from
leaving home for the first time and sleeping in a dormitory in
which enemies appear like shadows, to his sadness at his parents'
separation and the death of a father figure from a bomb. For as
well as Prog Rock, flared trousers and industrial strikes, this was
the era of the Troubles. An introvert in an extraverted world,
Harpur took refuge in Homer and the magical world of Troy, and
found that school could be a haven, and even fun: a sex education
lesson that backfired; a rare sighting of girls at a dance; a scary
ride on his brother's illegal motorbike; a surreal trip to Covent
Garden. Powerful, poignant and humorous, The Examined Life
re-creates a 'vale of soul-making' that, with its tragedy and
comedy, heroes and villains, is like a microcosm of life itself. 'A
quite marvellous work...an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the
snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' -From the
foreword by STEPHEN FRY
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