High Jinx

It would need a Thesaurus to do full justice to the sheer awfulness of this book. Obnoxious, offensive, objectionable, odious – and that’s just the entries beginning with ‘o’. Reading it is like sharing a railway carriage with some unsupervised, tipsy, spoilt, desperately attention-seeking public school girls coming back from a spree. Any odd, amusing remark is soon drowned out by the general insistence to ‘Look at me, listen to me, and let me know if I am really shocking you yet?’ The novel is set in exclusive Stagmount School, a transparent pseudonym for Roedean, the school attended by the author before leaving it to work as a journalist. It charts the unimportant lives of a group of foul-mouthed, drug-taking, semi-alcoholic, rich 17-year-old girl pupils, all of whom enjoy bathing in what they imagine to be their own reflected glory. But enter, in traditional fashion, a snooty, scheming new girl ‘with big porno-mouth lips’ and the designer gloves are off (blatant and regular product placement happens throughout this novel). Throw in a couple of fat, ugly and malevolent older lady teachers, who are so hated that the class makes no attempt to help when one of them is badly injured, and off we go. If this whole salacious mess were better written, there might still be something to say for it, but this is stale, clunking prose featuring ‘veritable armies’, ‘gimlet eyes’ and where heads are knocked ‘unceremoniously’ from pillows while ‘muffled curses’ ring out in true Just William style. The author is closely acquainted with Julie Burchill, which might explain the disparaging remarks about the Guardian plus the swipe at Tony Parsons. The cover announces that this book will be made into a major Channel 4 series. If so, it will be a new low for public broadcasting, accompanying an already fairly bad low for a great publishing house.