The Lessons [Paperback]

Many reviews, on this site and in the national press, have noted the similarities between this book and various other well-loved novels, and it is quite true that aspects of this new book by Naomi Alderman are far from original. However I still think this book has its own strong and beguiling story to tell and it is a rewarding read.

The central character, James, has a difficult time when he first arrives in Oxford. His bossy sister, an Oxford graduate herself, has told him exactly what he must do to get the most out of the Oxford experience, but he struggles. Everybody seems to be brighter, richer and more confident than him. His life, although not necessarily his studying, improves when he meets Jess and subsequently gets introduced to the amazing Mark and his friends. None of these are people his sister would approve of, but these are the people who will influence his life for many years to come. Mark is unbelievably wealthy; he is also gay, promiscuous and manipulative. He invites James, Jess and the other members of the group to live rent-free in the large, rambling house he happens to own and the champagne flows freely.

The story follows this group of people as they go through their university years and then move on into careers and adult relationships. The ties begin to weaken as they move further away from the Oxford years, and the other members of the group establish lives that are not controlled by Mark. James, however, finds it more difficult.

I really enjoyed this book. I got involved with the characters and, actually Ms Alderman, I would really like to know what happened to them all in later life. A sequel at some point in the future would be nice!

An enjoyable but often frustrating book about a middle-class boy who gets led astray by his super-rich, super-troubled best friend at Oxford. On the positive side, Alderman writes extremely entertainingly and creates some likeable and interesting characters (particularly Jess, the violinist and music student who becomes the girlfriend of the narrator, and Franny, the Jewish intellectual student who has complicated relationships with men, and who I'd like to have seen more of). Much of the story is set in Oxford, where the group of friends in the novel are students - unfortunately, though there are some lovely descriptions of Oxford as a place, Alderman tends to caricature the dons, and soon gives up on trying to give a proper picture of student life (the six friends in the novel are so cushioned by the anti-hero's money that they end up living a life distant from the university as such). My main problems with the novel were firstly that I found the super-rich anti-hero Mark so dislikeable (always a problem in a novel if someone is a main character) and the narrator, James, a rather weak and boring character. Had Alderman tried telling the story from several perspectives it might have made a richer and more interesting whole - I'd have liked to hear more from Franny, the mysterious Spanish girl Emmanuella and from Jess. James just wasn't interesting enough as a person to carry the weight of the whole novel. The novel became increasingly claustrophobic, with James and Mark locked in their destructive affair - by the end, I was thoroughly fed up with both of them. All I hope is that James really did escape for good and make something of himself (and develop more of a personality!) at the end of the novel. Certainly worth reading - and I'll probably re-read it - but one was left feeling that this could have been a much more interesting book than it was, and with a feeling of distaste for the extremely rich and powerful.

I read "Brideshead" and "The Secret History" so many years ago that my memories of them are too vague for them to have hovered in the background as they have for several Amazon reviewers; so I read "The Lessons" without making comparisons.

First impression: I have read few authors who evoke images quite as vividly as Alderman does. They gripped me right from the Prologue in which she describes a swimming pool full of the half-eaten remains of a meal, thrown in by drunken and stoned party goers. Or there is the memorable description of the huge and dilapidated grounds and mansion tucked away behind a high wall in one of the meaner parts of Oxford. The mansion, with some forty rooms, belongs to Mark Winters, the fabulously rich, gay and Catholic undergraduate, and there he plays host to a group of six fellow-students of both sexes. There are drugs, drinks, and sex. The narrator, James Stieff, lonely and insecure in his first term at Oxford (it is the early 1990s), is part this circle. Mark has them all move out of their college rooms to live, rent-free, in the mansion.

After a while, the novel narrows its focus somewhat to James' two relationships, a loving one with his sensible friend Jess, and the other with the unstable and dangerously unpredictable Mark, though there is, while they were all at Oxford, only one incident which shows how dangerous Mark can be, and his instability is also just about kept under control: there is, after all, the friendship and companionship between them all in that mansion and in that special ambience of Oxford university life, so many aspects of which are brilliantly evoked by the author.

But Oxford life does not got on for ever, and after three years (and a dramatic incident on the last evening which will shape James' life for years thereafter) the little group disperses. James and Jess set up house together, but their contacts with the rest of the group becomes sporadic and marginal - and Mark disappears altogether for the next two years. But then, fatefully, he reappears in their lives. What follows is painful and we know the story is inexorably heading for tragedy and disaster.

I found a significant part of the coda - the device used to tie up loose ends - unbelievable. But this part, too, is compellingly written.