Just finished reading Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal (also known as What Was She Thinking in the US), which I picked up because, I admit, the blurb featured some hyperbolic praise comparing the work to that of Amis or McEwan and the first chapter was compelling. The book was, it turns out, nominated for a Booker the year Vernon God Little won, so it's good to know that at least I have a decent publishing-industry eye. And well, the subject matter is very of the times, given what seems to be a spate of female teachers in the news for having affairs.
Anyway, Notes on a Scandal is the tale of Sheba Hart (short for Bathsheba, and that adulterous name will portend something), an English schoolteacher who has an affair with a student, told through the eyes of her friend and fellow teacher Barbara Covett, a sixtysomething-year-old single teacher, the very stereotype of the aging spinster (she even lives with her cat). What Heller does well is absorb you in the world view of Barbara, who moves from what one thinks is an impassive, observant narrator with nothing worse in her than a schoolmarmish tendency to complain about the state of basic comprehensive education, to something altogether more disturbing as the story progresses.
Sheba (who will be played by Cate Blanchett in the upcoming film) needs her friend Barbara (Judi Dench), of course, as a shield against the media hordes once her scandalous story breaks, but as Notes progresses it becomes clear that Barbara needs Sheba too, and Barbara's loneliness increasingly is revealed as a sort of sinister neediness. It's a story of twin obsessions: Sheba's increasing sexual/romantic obsession with her student, and Barbara's obsession with her friend, the former manifestly obvious, the latter revealed slowly. It's a real page-turner, and Heller's writing is incredibly fine, balancing between Barbara's astute observations of the world and of the things people hide in their own accounts of the world, while simultaneously hiding things from us. On Sheba, Barbara writes near the beginning, that "even now she is inclined to romanticise the relationship and to underestimate the irresponsibility - the wrongness - of her actions", although her factual accounts of the affair can be trusted - yet by the book's end, we wonder just how much the same applies to the narrator we thought we knew, and we wonder just where she gets her confidence that she and Sheba share a "relationship de chaleur", one of "uncommon intimacy and trust". It's a novel stalked by the doubts of relationships - whether of lovers, of friends, or of reader and narrator - and Heller pulls it off wonderfully.
Article comments
1 - Nicole
wonderful novel, even better than the movie which i thoroughly enjoyed. The character of Barbara and her increasingly sinister objectives were so much more obvious in the book. I felt strong sympathy for both the strong female protaganists, even though both of them are quite vile in a basic synopsis. Page-turner of the best quality. 4 stars (of 5)