The Following Girls by Louise Levene (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99)
I suppose the days are long gone when visiting bores at school speech days would assure their disaffected audience that schooldays were the best days of their lives. Nor, presumably, did they ever point out what an excellent training school offers for life in the wider world, with its ample opportunities to engage in treachery, mendacity, extortion, blackmail, subversion and the mental and physical torture of the gentle and vulnerable.
Louise Levene’s third novel casts a gaze of sprightly malice over that most rareified of forcing-houses for high emotion and low cunning: the fifth-form of a girls’ school with aspirations to gentility. The time is the mid-Seventies and Amanda Baker and her three chums, also called Amanda (a characteristically precise detail — my own mid-Seventies girls’ school was awash with Amandas), are idly planning a campaign of subversion against the Fawcett Code — the guiding principles of their day school, Mildred Fawcett, whose name echoes that of the suffragist, Millicent Fawcett.
Angry discontent is Baker’s default emotional setting. Her father is brutally disappointed in her; her stepmother, Pam (“Spam”), tries to convey affection by confecting ambitious meals randomly flavoured with fenugreek or asafoetida; her mother, Patsy, abandoned the family when her daughter was three. Aged 14, Baker discovered a letter Patsy had written to her unborn child, to be read in the event of her death. “Dear Jeremy (or Amanda),” it began.
There is ample fuel here for a more than ordinarily turbulent adolescence, and by degrees Baker’s outraging of the Fawcett Code mutates into a darker and more self-destructive form of protest. Levene’s sharply observed comedy mixes affectionate satire of the stylistic oddities of the time with an invigorating sparkle of real dislike for the petty tyrannies of parental and pedagogical authority: admirers of George Orwell will feel a chilly frisson of recognition at the scene in which the headmistress, Dr O’Brien, induces Baker to betray her best friend and fellow subversive, Julia.
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