Spare a thought for James Scudamore, whose fourth novel is published on the same day as Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. At least Mantel has shown a little mercy – there’s an endorsement from her on the cover, describing Scudamore as a “force in the English novel” – but it’s fair to say that most booksellers will be focused on Mantel for the moment.
Still, Scudamore’s subject – the messed-up-ness of the English ruling classes – is as good as timeless. And after an underpowered opening, you begin to see what Mantel was getting at. English Monsters is a book that stays with you, but only if you stay with it.
Our narrator is Max Denyer whose “prelapsarian” childhood in the Midlands with his grandparents comes to an end when he is sent to board at “the school on the hill”, a preparatory institution for 100 boys and 20 girls. The term “prep school” takes on a sinister shimmer: for what are these children being prepared? “We became less knowable to our parents,” Max reflects later, “and our strangeness went entirely unchecked so long as we observed the strangeness imposed on us by the school.” Not that his parents question it. His father is a businessman in Mexico and the company he works for is happy to pay the school fees.
Max spends the first few months crying, not understanding any of the systems. “Nonchalance was key, with a dash of entitlement,” he learns. He is placed in Agincourt house (it could have been Hastings or Somme), where he makes friends with Simon, a quiet computer nerd, and Luke, an urbane prankster, whose older brother, Ali, is a prefect.
This is 1986, the year that corporal punishment was outlawed in English state schools. Private schools retained the right to beat their pupils until 1998, and Mr “Weapons” Davis, a history teacher, takes full advantage. He throws boys down stairs, beats them with canes and shoes, and is later discovered to have sexually abused a number of pupils. The doddering headmaster, Mr Sutton, who has been known to use a riding crop himself, turns a blind eye to a regime that his even more violent father, the previous headmaster, had installed.
The boys are drawn to Mr Crighton – “Crimble”, as they call him – a gentler, jazz-loving master who takes his favourites youth hostelling and ghost hunting. He is rumoured to be in a relationship with Simon’s mother, a secretary at the school, but as Max discovers many years later, he is more taken with Simon.
Curiously, the first section is the least engaging part of the book, not helped by the fact that Max is an indistinct narrator, always at one remove, and so many pages are wasted on a static storyline centred on his grandfather. But the book comes to life when Scudamore begins to probe the long aftermath of the abuse over future decades. Until the abuse is acknowledged, it festers.
In 1997, Max, now a drifting musician, plays at a school reunion to celebrate Mr Sutton’s retirement. It’s sabotaged by Simon, who unfurls a banner reading: “How much did they know?” But when we catch up with Simon in 2006, he is still dutifully accompanying Crighton to jazz gigs each year, unable to break the hold. When Max joins them, even knowing what he knows, he too feels that “desire to be precocious. The eagerness to please.”
Scudamore deftly balances creepiness and tenderness in Simon and Crighton’s relationship (the teacher’s love letters make the skin crawl) while retaining a cool anger at the imperial mindset that the boarding school system cultivates. After Max persuades his father that “benign amusement” is not the appropriate attitude towards ritualised abuse, he reflects on the irony: “I doubt I would have had the skills to damn the place as eloquently as I did had I not been educated there.” But on a web forum set up for victims of the abuse, the never-did-me-any-harmers are rife, irritated that their dewy-eyed memories of school should be spoiled. Max drily notes that they almost all live in former colonies.
The suspense builds in the beautifully paced closing section, as the embers of past trauma glow and crackle into life. English Monsters is one of the most well-observed novels I’ve read on the way that childhood abuse lingers into adulthood. “There is no solving it,” as Simon protests when Max attempts to find justice on his friend’s behalf. “It isn’t going away.”
• English Monsters by James Scudamore is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
