The most autobiographical novel of an author who specialises in such an approach to fiction, A Good School is not the best book by Yates but is still better than most. For those of you not yet familiar with this superb writer, can I urge you to lose no more time in discovering him? Actually this is no mean place to start an exploration of his oeuvre for although published in 1978, it takes as its inspiration Yates's own school days in the early to mid forties and much can be learnt of the author and his later preoccupations from this fictionalised account. In elegant and effortless prose Yates quickly paints a world and a cast of characters which you very rapidly find yourself caring about, the human perception and emotional honesty which typifies all his writing is here in spades. The best trick of the book is the skill with which Yates manages to evoke that dualistic approach many of us adopt in looking back on our schooldays-which as here can often be riven with feelings of inadequacy, bullying, struggles for status and personal tragedy-yet somehow still coating them with the haze of nostalgia for a lost idealism and the energy of youth. In Yates's unsentimental hands teachers and boys live and hurt, learning that the certainties of youth are anything but: school offering a glimpse of a troubled future. Recommended to all and as a stepping stone to the great Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying
