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truepennyA conversation on someone else's LJ reminded me of a long-standing curiosity. And now that, hey, I have people around who are extraordinarily well-read, I thought I'd pose the question.
Books about boarding schools that get it right.
There's a long post I made back in December about a number of reasons why Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week is a better res (Latin for "thing"--I can't think of a word for what I want) than the Harry Potter books. One of those reasons is that Rowling's vision of what boarding school is like doesn't ring true, even to an American reader such as myself. But, when I grumble, Someone ought to write a book that does this properly, I can't put my money where my mouth is, because I don't actually know what I'm talking about. I can just tell a dreamy delusion when I see one. So I'm interested in finding books that achieve a more accurate representation.
Obviously, if the book is sf/f/h, that's a big bonus, but for the purposes of this book-quest, it's the boarding-school-ness I'm looking for. All suggestions welcome and appreciated!
Books about boarding schools that get it right.
There's a long post I made back in December about a number of reasons why Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week is a better res (Latin for "thing"--I can't think of a word for what I want) than the Harry Potter books. One of those reasons is that Rowling's vision of what boarding school is like doesn't ring true, even to an American reader such as myself. But, when I grumble, Someone ought to write a book that does this properly, I can't put my money where my mouth is, because I don't actually know what I'm talking about. I can just tell a dreamy delusion when I see one. So I'm interested in finding books that achieve a more accurate representation.
Obviously, if the book is sf/f/h, that's a big bonus, but for the purposes of this book-quest, it's the boarding-school-ness I'm looking for. All suggestions welcome and appreciated!
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Date: 2003-03-12 06:23 am (UTC)The first book in the sequence is Autumn Term. The first non-school book in the sequence is Falconer's Lure. They're idealised/adventurous versions of boarding school, yes, but Forest doesn't conceal the bullying or the boredom or the home-sickness or the sheer stupidity. Very upper-middle-class, but then any realistic representation of kids at boarding school is going to be upper-middle-class - below that income level it's not affordable for anyone except overseas workers with an allowance.
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Date: 2003-03-12 01:29 pm (UTC)As part of the backstory L-space for LOP, btw, (ie, the bit where all stories join up) I believe Caitlin went to Kingscote, as did her "aunt" Miss Franklin.
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Date: 2003-03-12 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 09:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 09:44 am (UTC)Thanx for rec re: Jennings.
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Date: 2003-03-12 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 02:55 pm (UTC)O the agonies of being separated from any part of one's book collection! Ten boxes worth of my books are in storage, and I miss them. *sobs* But at least they're only a few floors away, not thousands of miles. I sympathize very much.
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Date: 2003-03-12 03:32 pm (UTC).m, possibly mad
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Date: 2003-03-12 03:36 pm (UTC)CS Lewis talks about caning too - who doesn't? - but was a lot more resentful about the enforced enthusiasm for games and lack of privacy and leisure. He hated not so much that it was cruel, but that it was stupid.
The worst thing about not having my books is that I was sure I had taken the ones I'd need to refer to and left the ones I wouldn't, and I think I had my categories backwards. I always need to look up something that's not here.
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Date: 2003-03-12 04:11 pm (UTC).m
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Date: 2003-03-12 08:44 pm (UTC)I'll also recommend Stephen Fry's quite obscene play on the subject. I can't remember the title, but it's published in the back of his book of essays, "Paperweight," and they're worth reading too. I wouldn't say the play's *realistic*, precisely, but it's almost certainly not a dreamy delusion, and he did go to boarding school. His memoir, "Moab is my Washpot," deals with his school career too, and it's far from dreamy and idealistic (he wasn't the most honest or law-abiding of students.)
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Date: 2003-03-13 05:57 am (UTC)Stephen Fry's play
Date: 2003-03-13 06:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 06:32 am (UTC)David Copperfield
Tom Brown's Schooldays
You might want to look at Orwell's "Such, such were the joys", in one of the collected volumes of his essays, letters and journalism, though it isn't a novel.
I don't think any of them quite capture the combination of claustrophobia with the horrible loneliness that arises from having nobody to talk to while never being alone for a moment that is boarding school.
When I was fourteen, one of my daydreams was hunting down and torturing to death Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil, whose many cheery novels of boarding school life had led me to believe that this would be jolly fun and a good idea. This was about as popular as daydreaming about suicide, but my absolute favourite daydream was of being let loose with a machine gun in the centre of the space around which we lined up for lunch.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Roger Zelazny, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Robert Heinlein and most of all Tolkien for the way they stood shoulder to shoulder with me in those difficult times and never let me down.
Gosh I like being grown up.
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Date: 2003-03-12 08:56 am (UTC)Shall hunt down the others.
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Date: 2003-03-12 09:32 am (UTC)I think the reason Harry Potter -- I've only read the first three -- is so very much a phenomenon is that boarding school stories used to be one of the major ingredients of children's reading, but the old ones are now so totally politically impossible because they are snobbish and sexist and racist and no parent can take their values seriously, and modern ones with good values lack some of the essentials of what made Blyton and Brazil and Frank Harris and so on popular. Zorinth, at nine when I thought of this and asked him, hadn't read any school stories except Potter and Witch Week. So Potter coming along into this gap with the snobbery and everything just the same, except directed at Muggles rather than people with different skin colour/less money, makes nobody uncomfortable, while filling the delightful wish fulfilment niche for under elevens. (When Zorinth was nine, he and all his good friends genuinely expected to be invited to Hogwarts at eleven. By the time they were eleven they'd grown out of this, naturally.) Combined with perfectly good stories, archetypal characters and very clear incluing, no wonder everyone loves them.
As for Malory Towers, the main characters graduated and went to St. Andrews in 1967. If anyone would like to write a brief satire of those particular girls discovering sex, drugs, rock and roll, and a world with shades of grey in it, I think it would be acceptable satire.
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Date: 2003-03-12 09:58 am (UTC)I'm trying to get the two concepts, Malory Towers and sex, drugs, & rock'n'roll, into the same frame of reference, and I just can't do it. Except to think that here, at long last, would be Gwendolyn's chance to one-up everybody else; she had to get a job, she's been out in the world, she would know the ropes. Somehow I can see Gwendolyn with a cigarette (a la Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago, since I just saw that recently), smirking as Darryl and Sally cough and sputter.
My god, Malfoy is so Gwendolyn. I wonder if he's got a similar Great Come-uppance waiting for him.
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Date: 2003-03-12 02:10 pm (UTC)Oh, well, in that case, what about a couple of Madeleine L'Engle's early mainstream novels? I think And Both Were Young and The Small Rain have boarding schools, and at least in the first one the protagonist's experience is much like that.
I can't speak as to the authenticity, but I believe L'Engle went to one herself and didn't much like it; that would be, I guess, somewhere in Two-Part Invention.
Pamela
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Date: 2003-03-12 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 09:40 am (UTC):)
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Date: 2003-03-12 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 10:13 am (UTC)Sometimes, Charlotte Bronte is a terrible prig.
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Date: 2003-03-12 08:52 pm (UTC)I'll try again some time when I'm not trying to be a proper Victorian girl.
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Date: 2003-03-12 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 09:15 am (UTC)As for recommendations, you really should look up the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. Very, very funny and, people who've been to public school (including Stephen Fry) tell me, suprisingly accurate (if possibly a little rose tinted) about public schools.
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Date: 2003-03-12 09:43 am (UTC)*wonders what kind of luck she'll have finding those books in USA and if it will be at all comparable to that of a snowball in Hell*
But I'll look anyway. And will go insane with glee when/if I find them. I love the book-hunting nearly as much as I love the book-reading.
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Date: 2003-03-12 08:05 am (UTC)Feel free to ask any boarding school related question!
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Date: 2003-03-12 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 01:04 pm (UTC)According to various British friends who spent time at public school, it's unutterably horrible -- they're all scarred for life. The beatings and humiliations are discussed by Oliver Sacks in Uncle Tungsten, and CS Lewis mentions them along with sexual abuse in Surprised by Joy.
Some other boarding-school books:
John McPhee, The Headmaster (nonfiction, American)
Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (roman a clef, American, said to be a very fair portrait; my informant attended the school this book is based on)
RF Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days (a lovely book, British, I don't know how realistic. It's told from the POV of a WWI vet who starts teaching while recovering from shell-shock; interesting views of class, since the teacher is a Welsh coal-miner's son)
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Date: 2003-03-12 01:12 pm (UTC)Is the institution in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase really a school? I remember it as a particularly foul species of orphanage ... but then it's been easily 15 years since I last read it.
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Date: 2003-03-13 06:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-12 01:50 pm (UTC)But as far as I know, American boarding school stories are pretty thin on the ground. (Are there any others? Is the school in Peter Straub's Shadowland a boarding school or just an extremely swank prep school?) Whereas English boarding school stories seem to constitute their own little genre, and I suppose it's that as much as anything else that I'm interested in.
But thank you for reminding me of A Separate Peace. Because you're right.
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Date: 2003-03-12 03:13 pm (UTC)I liked the one with Robin Williams...oh yes, "Dead Poets Club".
Psmith
Date: 2003-03-12 07:22 pm (UTC)P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith series takes place in a boarding school or two. Silly fun, like all of Wodehouse, and rather too much cricket, but there *is* a certain undercurrent of ugliness.
Re: Psmith
Date: 2003-03-12 07:28 pm (UTC)At this rate, I'm going to need a small sturdy goblin to trot around after me just to carry around my booklist.
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Date: 2003-03-14 11:46 am (UTC)Kit Pearson's The Daring Game - set in Canada probably in the 1960s, probably in an analogue of York House in Vancouver.
Madeleine L'Engle's And Both Were Young - set in Switzerland shortly after World War II.
Madeleine L'Engle's Prelude (or is it A Small Rain) - similar setting, but not a happy ending.
Other odd boarding school stories:
My Brilliant Career> and another novel from the same publisher about a girl who goes to Catholic boarding school, writes lurid romances for fun, and gets kicked out of school and despised by her father because the school authorities assume that she must have been having sex herself to imagine such things.
Catcher in the Rye
movies: Flirting (Australian), Dead Poets' Society (American), children of a lesser god (American)
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Date: 2003-03-15 06:16 pm (UTC)my recollection is that your remark was something along the lines of this book improving with rereading? no? anyway, i wanted to request your thoughts and at least here the request fits in a little bit with the topic at hand.
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Date: 2003-03-15 06:36 pm (UTC)My other remarks on A College of Magics are back here (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=truepenny&itemid=18944). (There may be other remarks other places, but I'm too lazy to go look for them.)
I think A College of Magics is an excellent book. The first time I read it, I was all cluttered up with genre expectations about how comedy of manners/romance type books ought to end, and that made me disgruntled. But the second time I read it--after I'd temporarily lost the book for five years--I remembered what was coming, and suddenly saw all the ways in which that ending was necessary and made sense and was actually extremely beautiful. It's a very HARD ending to what has been a largely light book, but it comes quite organically out of everything that has gone before.
Um, I can go on, probably for hours, but that's my basic what-do-you-think-of-ACoM response. If you want to lob another question at me, please do!
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Date: 2003-03-15 06:52 pm (UTC)i guess my thought is that the ending makes it a much better book although i in no way saw it coming. i definitely see what you mean about genre expectations but i was sort of irked with how perfect tyrian was up until that point. making it hard made it more thought-provoking.
i really liked the school (greenlaw) parts and yes, i adore jane, too. i thought that the weakest part of the book was menary and wonder if you had an opinion about her and how she is drawn? i sort of felt like there was no reason for her to be the way that she is except for plot needs and what? corruption by the rift? it took me a bit of time to warm to farris, too, but i eventually did.
SPOILERS FOR A COLLEGE OF MAGICS (in case anyone else gets this far)
Date: 2003-03-15 07:22 pm (UTC)My reading of Menary goes like this: she's hollow. There's nothing inside her and never has been. At most, there's a angry, selfish little girl who has all these adult tools at her disposal. She stands against Faris's awe-ful dutifulness, and I think we need Menary's willingness to destroy the fabric of reality to get what she wants in order to appreciate fully Faris's willingness to sacrifice everything in order to stop her. No, Menary has no psychologically credible motivation, but like I said, she's Iago. She doesn't NEED psychology.
But looking at what I've just written, I observe that my take on Menary depends on a particular and idiosyncratic approach to characterization and structure and therefore may not actually constitute a defense. Menary has never bothered me, either for the reasons you mention or for
I have a weakness for unabashedly melodramatic vilainesses.
Re: SPOILERS FOR A COLLEGE OF MAGICS (in case anyone else gets this far)
Date: 2003-03-15 07:45 pm (UTC)i think that there is some motivation for why faris doesn't like him--he apparently disregards her opinion on things, tries to paint her as hysterical and doesn't care about galvaston (did i get that right?) in the exact way that she feels that he should, although she has a revelation along those lines, too. why doesn't he like her? she's opinionated and not tactful about it--not deferential enough? it doesn't have the same "out of left field" feel to it.
i totally get what you are saying about melodramatic villainess but stevermer seems to have taken a lot more time to paint why other people are doing things than she took with menary. don't mistake me--she doesn't ruin the book or anything. probably she bumps against some expectation of mine that a rereading will bring forward, or something.