Harris, Joanne: Gentlemen & Players

William Morrow © 2006, 422 pages

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' 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.

Comments

[TexasRed]

Looks great! I'll put it on my To Be Read list.

[Clare D]

Yes, that's just what I thought! I loved the plot twist too...

[Debra Hamel]

Thanks, Clare! Maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but I really was surprised when certain things were revealed late in the book.