Popular teacher’s death darkens halls of U.K. high school

Dark Like Under is the first novel by British author Alice Chadwick, a graduate of Cambridge University and of the selective City Lit fiction masterclass. Tabbed as an editor’s choice by The Bookseller, the novel has received praise in the U.K. from the Independent and British Vogue, among others.

While the book is a coming-of-age story of sorts, rather than filter events through one protagonist, the novel follows multiple characters as they journey from adolescent innocence to a new understanding of the adult world.

The book is set in the late 1980s in a small unnamed town in Margaret Thatcher’s England, a time of austerity and class warfare. Mr. Ardennes, a popular teacher at an elite high school, has unexpectedly died, and students and staff are left to grapple with the loss. The entire story unfolds over a period of 24 hours on a hot day in late spring.

Dark Like Under is a quiet book. The conflicts are understated: much is said about class in just a few words. There are several references to “the other school” that is nearby but off limits for unstated reasons; when two characters pay it an illicit visit, the reader sees its male students playing football and shouting “Good work in the box” and its female students wearing short, tight uniform skirts and the distinctions become clear. The divisions of race have not yet reached this community, where the outsiders are Irish and/or Roman Catholic.

While there are brief mentions of apartheid, the aftermath of the Falklands War and the famine in Ethiopia, the teenaged characters are largely preoccupied with the same things that concern today’s adolescents: crushes, romantic relationships, the betrayal of friends, the arbitrariness and tyranny of parental and school rules, whether to try to fit in or to rebel. These are big feelings aired within the smaller confines of the novel. A student and a teacher stand off over the wearing of nail polish. A boy sends a note to a girl and her classmates long to know what it contains. A student worries about his strict parents’ reaction to his music lesson being cancelled.

The school schedule ingeniously forms much of the structure of the book. The students attend art, math, chemistry, French and English classes, and in each of those, Chadwick juxtaposes the lessons being ostensibly taught with the ones being learned below the surface.

In English class, a discussion of a John Donne sonnet, and its imagery suggesting commitment and desire, ends with the eternal question “Is this even on our syllabus?” The teacher’s response illustrates the impact of his colleague’s death upon him: “If you mean will you be examined on this? No. You will not. But should you read it? Should you engage with these ideas? As a human being, as a young man or young woman, wading, more or less innocent, more or less defenceless, into the great boiling sea of language, of literature, history, ideology, human experience and other effluents and intoxicants, yes, I think you should read it. I think you should. Because one day, even you, Nicholas, might need it. Even you one day might find yourself grabbing at a poem like a man going under.”

The students experience the teachers as overbearing authority figures who nevertheless cannot give them as simple a direction as removing their blazers in the extreme heat without the say-so of the head teacher.

But in their chapters, these teachers come to life as colleagues and friends of the deceased, struggling with the politics of school administration as well as their own grief and unfulfilled desires. The art teacher, who has sidelined her creative dreams for a steady paycheque, reflects that “Conviction is a sort of energy, she can see, a force of life in itself. You can’t get far without it. Things diminish, shrinking to the size of a square foot of board and painting by numbers.”

Dark Like Under is a wholly engrossing, multi-layered story told with a slow burn. The author’s decision to take the last chapter back 24 hours (rather than the linear progression that has unfolded up until that point) in order to end the novel with a chapter from the perspective of the newly deceased Mr. Ardennes is a rare false note.

Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April.