No matter how challenging one’s job, no matter how problematic one’s colleagues, there are few environments in life more difficult to negotiate than school. Fourteen years in the company of other young people, each one on high alert for fluctuations in the status quo, and you’re not even paid for the privilege. It’s the hard-knock life but we all go through it and the most memorable days are those when something unusual happens.
In Alice Chadwick’s debut, that something is the death of a teacher, Mr Ardennes, whose loss reverberates through this early 1980s school like a cry in the dark, eliciting varying reactions.
There are the students who liked him but are wary of showing emotion. The headmaster who succumbs to a mental breakdown. The teachers who share inappropriate stories of their own teenage years. The children who can’t understand why they’re not being given a day off. And the fact that someone – adult or child – always seems to be wandering the corridors, desperately looking for an exit strategy.
Setting the novel across a single day offers insights into the politics of school life and Chadwick excels at describing how teenagers are convinced that even their smallest interactions are of global importance. For Robin and Thomasina, it’s the scandal of the former unexpectedly hooking up with the hottest boy in their year. For James, an arch-Catholic who, hilariously, plans on joining the Benedictine Order of Saint-Étienne, it’s the moral behaviour of his classmates. For the lachrymose Claire, it’s the memories of her own mother’s death, a grief that repeatedly sends her to Matron’s office. While for Miss Harper, it’s the brutal efficiency with which the dead man’s face is removed from the staff picture gallery.
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Dark Like Under is a strange, unsettling, but rather brilliant novel. The school comes across like a tinderbox, one that requires only a single tragedy to spark the flame that sets it alight. Teachers and students seem more like guards and prisoners, only it’s not entirely clear which is which. As the clock ticks down towards midnight, it seems surprising that Mr Ardennes is the only one to have gone to the great classroom in the sky.
