BOOKS: Gentlemen & Players, Joanne Harris (2006)

This is Harris's seventh novel; I have read none of the others. My perception of her, from what I've read about her and what I've heard from those who have read her books, has always been that she's a skilled writer of exactly the sort of sentimental goo that would make me want to pound my head against a wall and beg for the sweet release of death. (The closest I have come to Harris's work is the film adaptation of Chocolat, which certainly didn't do much to dispel that perception.)

It is, of course, horribly unfair to judge a writer based on second-hand reports and someone else's interpretations of her work, but we all do it, and so when Gentlemen & Players was recommended to me by people who know my taste, I was skeptical. But oh my, this is a fine novel, a crisp suspense thriller with some remarkable turns of plot, and a final series of twists that took my breath away. (And it is not remotely sentimental or gooey.)

The setting is St. Oswald's Grammar School for boys, a traditional English private school (or as the English call it, a "public school," which is often confusing to we Americans), and there are two narrators. The first is Roy Straitley, who has taught Latin at St. Oswald's for 30-some years; as part of the novel's theme of game-playing, his chapters are headed with a picture of a white chess king. The chapters of the other narrator, whose identity hides from us for most of the novel, are headed by a black pawn; for now, "Pawn" will do as a convenient name.

Pawn has been hired as a new faculty member in Straitley's department, and because of grudges and resentment that have festered since childhood, is out to destroy the school. Through a vicious series of pranks, misdeeds, and psychological plots, Pawn sets the faculty and students of St. Oswald's against one another.

Straitley's chapters are set in the present, and we watch as he gradually realizes that the troubling incidents at the school are not random, but part of an organized scheme. In Pawn's chapters, we watch the present-day scheming, and also flashback to childhood, when Pawn donned a St. Oswald's uniform and pretended to be one of the school's students.

Harris does a magnificent job of misdirection. I was feeling smug at having figured out Pawn's identity several pages before Straitley did, and even when it's revealed that Straitley (and the reader) has gotten it wrong, it took me far too many pages to realize what was really going on. It's the kind of ending that makes you want to re-read the book to see how the author has so thoroughly misled you without ever actually lying.