Notes on a Scandal (Paperback)

Ostensibly it's a novel about a rookie pottery class schoolteacher Sheba joining a north London comprehensive with high ideals but no sense of distance or discipline to her pupils. With a family life of older husband, troublesome teenage daughter and down's syndrome son, she's lost a little of the spark and romance in her life. What once independence was, is left clinging to her hippy dress sense and cycling to work. Sheba needs to make a difference. And so she is easily swayed by an illiterate pupil with a modicum of artist desire and an overwhelming crush on Miss.

But no, this is not what Notes on a scandal is all about. Narrated by Barbara, Sheba's 60 year old teacher colleague, this is a sly diary peek into Barbara's take on the affair and Barbara's world. A disturbing one dimensional slant on Sheba's story and ultimately Barbara's lonely spinstered life.

Notes on a scandal is an exceptional book for the detail and insight into Barbara, who at first, we think to trust and then learn to either despise or feel wholly sad for her prejudiced, narrow and emotionless existence. Barbara craves comfort and love, she needs people to rely on her, she manipulates because she is emotionally bereft. This is what makes the novel so unerringly clever and devious, for we really cannot believe all we are reading about Sheba's plight from Barbara's barbarous interpretation.

Notes on a scandal is witty, cunningly observational about relationships and a stark insight into a warped mind. A great read that'll stay with you for some time. Notes on a scandal II - the Sheba story, would be even more enticing.

Narrated by Barbara, a schoolteacher/spinster from hell it is ostensibly about her beautiful colleague Bathesheba's affair with a 14-year-old pupil. Where Bathsheba (note the Biblical name)known as Bash to her older husband and Sheba to her friends, descants on the beauty of her teenaged lover, the loathsomely funny Barbara can see only his squalid, mundane,lower-class worthlessness. Sheba's grand passion may be perfectly undetstandable - who wouldn't jump into the sack with a teenager, she thinks - it is a grubby little secret which inevitably ends up with both women sacked and trapped in a grisly folie a deux. Barbara is obsessed by class: her observations on middle-class families as they call out "what;sa the rice situation like?" and their easy assumption that everyone has a little house in France ticked away are an acid that eats through the pages. Set in the uneasy area of North London where I happen to live, it's hideously and hilariously recognisable.
At a deeper level, though, Heller isn't just writing about class, or even about the educational failure that inevitably (it seems)awaits the children of the poor. She's writing about power, and its abuse not only in the sexual sense but by a whole class. Bathsheba is a good person trying in her hopelessly ineffectual way to make a difference. She fails, partly through moral weakness and partly becuase of the intrinsically corrupting nature of the system. This is the kind of subject that modern British novelists rarely address - oddly, another excellent if more hopeful novel along similar lines called Sky High by Helen Falconer came out the same month. If you're fed up with a vision of Britain that is all bonnets and bustles, or all glamorously ethnic, Heller's novel is a good place to start, and Falconer's should follow it. And stuff all the critics who sneered at her two years ago. This girl has got what it takes.