At midday on 31st August, Sedgewick, the new history master, arrives at Blindefellows, former charity school for poor, blind boys, now a second division private school for anyone who can pay. The naïve newcomer is quickly taken under the wing of the rumbustious, philandering Japes, master of physics, who soon becomes something of a mentor, though not in an academic sense. A Blindefellows … Blindefellows Chronicle follows the adventures of Sedgewick, Japes and a handful of other unmarried faculty at an obscure West Country boarding school including the closeted headmaster, Reverend Hareton, stalwart Matron Ridgeway and loathsome librarian, Fairchild.
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A wonderful discovery: a recent publication with the style and substance of a comic novel of decades ago. Set in a private school in England, focusing on the teachers not the pupils, at first it reminded me of the Molesworth series by Geoffrey Willans, because it was so authentically parochial and whimsical. The novel’s character matures with its characters. By the second quarter, it reminded me of P.G. Wodehouse; and by the middle Evelyn Waugh. The structure is unusual, a cross between a novel and a collection of short stories. Each chapter is a discrete story over a period of days, separated from other chapters by years. The characters cross chapters and age dramatically, but each chapter tends to focus on one character or one peculiar event in a repeat character. The characters are strong. My favorite is also the main character: Japes. He effectively starts and ends the book. He bounds in with an appealing jauntiness, with witty cutting remarks and no fear, but also no pretensions and no lack of self-awareness, about his own ambiguous choices (such as serial philandering with no intent to marry). Without giving too much away, the book ends with Japes’ ending, and it is emotional. My empathy was tempered by my relief on finishing a book with a realistic and definitive ending, instead of a cop-out or a failure in imagination. The book takes a turn in its maturity in chapter 10, which focuses on a minor character, a teacher, who experiences an uncontrolled collapse of family life, told with sparseness and naturalism, and realistically shared blame, reminiscent of an Evelyn Waugh novel such as A Handful of Dust. The son turns out to have no interest in school or work or parental expectations, and is expelled after casually hacking the school and defaming other characters. The wife mourns the son’s departure, then fixates on a new rugby coach. All along, the teacher suspects the trajectory, but is more of a passenger than an influencer. It all ends badly for him, and yet he’s partially to blame, partially not to blame. It’s remarkably authentic. And thence eventually we come to the final chapter. Real events rarely appear in the overall book’s time span from the 1970s to the 2010s. This adds to the sense of insularity in the private school, but as in real Britain localism succumbs to internationalism, and parochialism proves unsustainable. In the penultimate chapter we are taken to Egypt, where Japes has taken himself for retirement, with typical dash, but takes a head wound during the revolution in 2011, and eventually is forced back to Britain, demented and curbed. In the final chapter, we find the main characters together in a care home: pathos abounds, parochialism is personified in flights of fancy and strange pets and strange routines. Then we end with Japes, and the pathos peaks, unshirked and agreeably meaningful, in the sense that a young person should read this book, in order to appreciate the great arc every life follows, with the same finality, which should prompt the young to live with a longer horizon than the young care to admit.
somewhat pointless and bloviating … a cliched view of academe
did not hold interest. Setting and characters not fully developed. Tried twice but could not finish it.
Truly delightful!