How easy it would have been for me to abandon The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton after only the first few pages and what a mistake! I seriously considered doing so but found myself too fascinated by the premise: a community shaken by a sex scandal between a student and a teacher at an all-girls high school and the local drama school that bases a play on the scandal. The format might not have been the most conventional or the easiest to read but, after a few chapters, I fell into its rhythm and by then I was so wrapped up in the story that you couldn’t have forced me to put it down.
I’m still reeling from the experience of reading this book. I was overwhelmed by it and completely enthralled. Though I usually like a plain, classical narrative structure, I found this fascinating with the way it jumped between those dealing with the sex scandal at the high school (specifically, several of the girls and their private saxophone teacher, a vaguely sinister character with an intense interest in the personal lives of her students that rivals Jean Brodie’s) and those involved in the drama school production. All of the characters, on stage or off, are presented as actors. The wonderful thing is how uncertain the reader is of who is acting at any given time. What is truth and what is fiction? How do you tell the two apart? Can you? Can’t a good actor appropriate a story from another source and, by convincing both herself and her audience that it is her story, make it the truth? I use the female pronoun purposely here because again and again in this novel it is the women who are the best at acting, at masking the truth, as Stanley (a drama student) observes:
Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multi-tasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening his hair on his crown, and boys could not. (p. 76-77)
Stanley, poor Stanley, trying to tell a story but surrounded constantly by women who know more about acting and lying and crafting and selling a story than he’ll learn in a lifetime. They are always the ones with the power and he is just collateral damage.
Power is a dominant theme here: the power parents have over children, teachers over students, women over men. The parents are distraught that one of their daughters could have been preyed upon by someone in a position of power but, as one of the teenage characters observes, they’re also terrified that they’ve lost their own power:
‘I’ll tell you why they’re so scared,’ Isolde says. ‘They’re scared because now she knows everything they know. They’re scared because now they’ve got no secrets left.’ (p.14)
Another student notes that it’s the girls themselves who have the most power. One word from them, one allegation, however untrue, could destroy a career, a life. They are the ones who keep everyone else in line.
Like all the girls (and the adults), I was frustrated by the lack of details about the relationship between Mr Saladin (the teacher) and his student Victoria. How did it start? How far did it go? For how long? What did they find in one another? Catton cleverly makes these two very minor players, used only sparingly to leave us in the dark, desperate for the smallest detail, willing to accept any bit of information as true until we hear the next conflicting thing. That was the real genius of the novel for me, how brilliantly Catton captured the jealous, gossiping, fantastical minds of teenage girls. All we know of the illicit relationship is funneled through these unreliable channels. You accept it as truth because you want to know, you want to have details to be able to make sense of what has happened but there are so many details, so many stories, that it’s impossible to know where they all came from, to be able to separate what might be true from what is not.
Overall, this was an amazing first novel from Catton (who, to my disgust, is only a few months older than me). I’ll be eager to see what she does in the future as she refines her skill.
This sounds like a riveting read! I’m writing the title and author down in my notebook. It’s definitely a book to look out for.
It most certainly is! I hope you get a chance to read it for yourself!
It is great to see that you enjoyed this book. I thought it had a fantastically inventive writing style and was very impressed. I was a bit confused, but it didn’t really matter. This book should have won the Orange prize instead of not even making the short list.
I found certain parts confusing but I loved how the style challenged me as a reader, not something I’m used to with most of my choices. Definitely agree that it was prize-worthy!
Never heard of this book, but I will surely keep an eye on it. Thanks for mentioning it!
It’s definitely worth trying if you come across it!
Yours may be the first review I’ve seen that takes note of the power structures in the book. It’s interesting that the women are the people with power in the book, which is often not the case in fiction or in real life.
P.S. Don’t you hate it when authors are brilliant and then they’re also super young? Then I feel bad about myself and my life! :p
I’ve only read a few reviews of this one but, going back and rereading them now, I am surprised that the power dynamics were not mentioned more since they seemed to me such an important theme.
Like Jenny, I’m interested in the fact that the power structure here seems so unlike the world as I know it.
And I hear you both on young authors.
See, to me the power structure seemed to echo what I am used to seeing in my normal life. Isn’t it interesting what different outlooks we all bring to the reading experience?
You’re right, that premise is too interesting to put the book and stop reading! 🙂
“What is truth and what is fiction? How do you tell the two apart?” Any book dealing with these questions is definitely worth reading and I really enjoy stories where the author challenges the reader with an unusual structure.
Sounds like this book would be perfect for you! I hope you get a chance to try it!
Very informative review. This sounds like the kind of book that I’d love to read. I shall see about getting it. 🙂
This has been on my wishlist for a while and you’ve added another incentive to actually start looking to buy the book.
I was transported by the book. It didn’t occur to me until after finishing it, and reading a review elsewhere, that there was a huge ambiguity about whether the bulk of the action was real, fantasised, or was actually snippets of the rehearsals (as the title implies) – or the performance – of the drama piece.
If either of the latter, it can clearly only consist of a collection of disparate subjective inferences by people peripheral to the main action, and this helps make sense of the shifting sense of the fantastic and the shimmering glimpses of the real.
The strongest prima facie evidence for this interpretation is the way scenes are often described in very much the same way a dramatist might sketch out, in a script, the visual and social ‘mood spaces’ at the opening of each scene.
As for the balance of power between genders referred to in this review and some responses, I have for a long time thought that it was a grave misunderstanding to look only at the balance of Formal power between the genders. In most societies, women have (it seems to me) had the predominance of Informal power, much of the time, for centuries. This (viewed large) broadly balances the formal power which was overwhelmingly, and still is predominantly, the preserve of men.
By informal power I mean a great many things, too many to list here, but starting with the power to shape society, both by (in traditional societies, including pre-feminism western ones) having the lion’s share of raising the young (I’m not sure I would go so far as Jesuit doctrine is quoted … you know “give me the child till the age of seven and I will give you the man” …, but it’s still the single most important function of society, to deliver secure and functional future citizens to the cusp of adulthood…
and carrying right on through till we end up at the influence good women have always had, in most societies, on good men. Which isn’t surprising, because the most important single person in the formative years of those good men was probably their mother.
In used to be the case that men would ruefully admit only in trusted company that they were in any sense “under the thumb” of their wives, or that the business they were engaged in was actually of less lasting importance than what their wives were about. It seems to me that now in many middle class contexts the first of these, at least, has become normalised. (And if the second has not, it is because the former divisions have become blurred, and women are also shouldering some of the trivial and passing concerns of business and entertainment, as well as judiciary, governmental, paramilitary and others arguably more meaningful at the scale of society as a whole…)
Interestingly, this still seems essentially either invisible or insufficient to many classical feminists.
I guess they’ve paid the price radicals generally pay for going out on a limb for their cause; when they’re no longer needed at the centre of the action, they’re
left somewhat stranded and bereft, unable to enjoy what they’ve achieved because it doesn’t look quite – or anything – (depending how radical they were) how they’d imagined.
But isn’t that what makes radicals indispensable to social change?
By wanting so much more than their cause can ever justifiably win, they make it possible for the cause to be carried to a new — and better-adapted –equilibrium with a changing society.