North

I agree with the earlier reviewer that North is a page turner. However, I think he misses the essentially moral dimension to this brilliant first novel. Our hero makes wrong choices throughout although on the face of things he appears to own his landscape. At the end, the reader has much to consider. There's a sniff of Simon Raven about this novel. North is a tantalizingly addictive literary thriller. The anonymous narrator tells his horrifying story of the precocious youth North with a careful yet casual objectivity. North's seduction of his teachers, both male and female, leads to a truly awful conclusion. Paradise is lost. I look forward eagerly to Brian Martin's next novel.

Some months ago in England, I read a borrowed copy of this book, and I have been waiting for it to be published here so that my wife can read it. I am sure it will provoke a lively discussion at her book club. `North' is a fascinating and elegantly-written novel by an English author-Brian Martin-who has apparently spent the major part of his life teaching English Literature at a private (`public' in England) school in Oxford. This is his first novel, and he has clearly taken to heart the old dictum `write what you know,' as the novel is narrated by-guess who?- a teacher of Eng. Lit. at a private school in the city of dreaming spires. But this is one of the strengths of the novel: Martin realistically evokes the ambiance of the university town and the internal politics, intrigues, and petty jealousies of a teachers' common-room. He also has a couple of well-drawn cameos of school trips to New York and Washington (dining at the Cosmos Club) and to Ravello, in Italy, for a poetry competition in which one of his pupils is competing. The novel focuses on the narrator's friendship and fascination with a pupil of seventeen or eighteen in the Sixth Form of the school (read 12th grade, or senior). The pupil, the eponymous North, may seem a trifle too sophisticated for American readers: in addition to being physically very attractive, he is well traveled, knowledgeable about wine, about drugs, about Milton's Paradise Lost, the theater, and classical music: a character not likely to be found in the average American high school-but not implausibly in some north-eastern preppie school that caters to the boys of old Wasp families and sends them on to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale-as North's fellow students are destined for Oxbridge. North seems to need the friendship of the narrator in order to explain to him his heterosexual intention to seduce a toothsome young female teacher; his homosexual intention to entice an attractive, married, evangelical male teacher into a physical affair with him; and then to manipulate the same teacher into a relationship with the headmaster of the school-a married man who North believes can be made aware of his latent homosexuality. The outcome of this story line is worked out in a fascinating and page-turning manner, with the narrator indulging in a great deal of Henry James-ish analysis of the motivations of the various characters-some of whom confide in him, while the motives and minds of others remain as subjects of his speculations. Although the theme of seduction is a feature of the plot, this is not a book that caters to those who like their sex served up in sweaty detail: rather, it takes a cool and analytic view of what is going on, with the narrator hearing restrained accounts of these developments from some of the participants. The obsession of the narrator with North is another motif of the book, and sometimes one is quite unsure whether we have an unreliable narrator who does not understand his own o