Harris, Joanne: Gentlemen & Players

Joanne Harris's Gentlemen & Players is told in the first person from two dueling perspectives. Roy Straitley is a classics teacher in his 34th year at St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, a private establishment steeped in tradition and resented by the locals who could never afford the school's tuition. The second narrator—who for much of the book is known by the alias "Julian Pinchbeck"—is a teacher who's new to the school but who, as a one-time townie, has a score to settle with St. Oswald's. Pinchbeck proves to be intriguingly evil—vengeful and misguided and jealous, yet not wholly unsympathetic, a genius at deception. Readers may be reminded, as I was, of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, a sociopath and chameleon who is, like Harris's protagonist, self-hating and motivated in part by obsessive love. Pinchbeck, having once haunted the halls of St. Oswald's in youth, now conducts a campaign against the school that culminates on Bonfire Night with a pair of jaw-dropping surprises.

Gentlemen & Players is an intelligent and suspenseful book, and it offers an unusual plot. Once released from the author's spell, one begins to think the story unlikely: it's hard to believe that Pinchbeck would go to such lengths, first to fit into the culture of St. Oswald's and then to destroy it (though I suppose going overboard is to be expected from an obsessive sociopath). Still, I had no trouble suspending disbelief when it mattered.