CRY HAVOC

Sixteen-year-old Ida Campbell picks the wrong time to start school at St. Anne’s. Not that there ever seems to be a right time; the building, set on a cliff overlooking the English Channel, “looked as if it had been caught in the act of falling down, and was now doing its best to hold itself together until you looked away again.” The headmistress, Miss Christie, is unusually preoccupied with fears of nuclear attack, and despite offering Ida a scholarship and arranging her travel from Scotland, greets her with, “Oh, but we weren’t expecting you to actually come.” Ida is running from her own demons, though, and when her new roommate, Louise Adler, vows to make her leave the school, she does everything she can to prevent that from happening. Meanwhile, Eleanor Alston, the middle-aged geography teacher, knows that new history teacher Matthew Langfield is telling lies, but she can’t figure out why. More importantly, students have begun to have seizures, causing mass panic and fear that the school will be forced to close. The atmosphere of St. Anne’s is a gloomy, derelict backdrop to the novel. As Louise says to Ida, “Someone could look at our lives and have no idea what decade it is.” Wait brightens up the story with a touch of the absurd, such as the convoluted play-within-a-play that the students attempt to put on for their parents and prospective students on the school’s open day with disastrous results, and the story of the aristocrat who built the school before he was “committed to an asylum…because it turned out he thought he was Julius Caesar.” The characters are delightfully strange and constantly surprising, perfectly suited to a novel shrouded in so many questions.