By Naomi Alderman
Viking, £12.99
Naomi Alderman's award-winning debut novel, Disobedience, ushered readers into the self-contained world of Orthodox Hendon. Her second, The Lessons, unfolds in a similarly cloistered environment, though at first glance its Oxford backdrop could hardly be further removed. The hushed quads and ancient spires seem a far cry from NW4's suburban semis and urban parks, yet both worlds have their own calendar, culture, and customs, and both are shaped by a tradition so intense it can feel stifling.
The novel's narrator, James Stieff, is acutely aware of all that Oxford stands for. He also has his big sister's Oxford experience to live up to. Before freshers' week begins, she lays out a plan for him: he is to join societies, work exceedingly hard, and befriend the right kind of people. "Oxford is a race," she cautions, so it bodes extra ill when, already struggling with his physics workload and having failed to forge even the wrong kind of friendships, he slips on an icy path while out jogging.
Indirectly, his fall sends him tumbling down a rabbit hole from which he will take more than a decade to emerge. Staying behind to catch up at the end of that first lonely term, he is adopted by a decadent clique of fellow students headed by rich, reckless Mark. James is soon romantically involved with one of them, Jess, and living with them all in Mark's crumbling Georgian mansion.
It is Mark's contradictory blend of cruelty and kindness, shrewdness and impetuosity that fuels this tale. In their own way, everyone who is drawn into his orbit is smitten, none more so than James. "What a painful person Mark must be to love," Jess observes, and Alderman imbues him with sufficient mercurial allure for the reader to empathise.
As graduation comes and goes and student hi-jinks give way to real-world worries, Mark's money insulates him from quotidian cares. It proves no defence against the tragedy that stalks the story's second half, however.
While Hendon was virgin territory in literary terms, Oxford has been granted inky immortality in countless novels, and Alderman enjoys toying with one in particular: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Sebastian's teddy bear, its most parodied motif, is alluded to in James's surname, and ironically hinted at throughout the novel.
Brideshead's Catholicism is present, too, thanks largely to Mark's exacting yet indulgent Italian mother. The creed's moral vocabulary informs Alderman's characters as they muse on such concepts as love, pain and absolution.
And then there's the homosexuality. Mark is openly gay and dabbles occasionally in bisexuality, seducing women including the novel's sole Jewish character, an opinionated intellectual who delights in prosciutto and develops a borderline drinking problem, eventually going on to academic glory.
You'll find none of the repression that defines Waugh's novel here. Instead, passion flows as freely as the liquor, a potent and jading potion that ultimately brings little satisfaction and much sadness. Sometimes, unquenched desire is preferable. As James observes on the subject of Mark's inexhaustible money, it "made all things possible and thus left nothing to be simply desirable".
It is hard to convey the range of this clever novel's concerns without making it sound like a heavy-handed fable. Immaculately paced and unfailingly compassionate, it lightly imparts lessons on everything from ambition and wealth to loss and longing.
Hephzibah Anderson is the author of 'Chastened' (Vintage)
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