Comedic chaos

Havoc
Rebecca Wait

This book was terribly good fun. Set in a girls’ boarding school, it features all the tropes you’d expect: a remote setting, drafty and crumbling buildings, unappetizing food, arcane rules, unsympathetic and incompetent teachers, the obligatory ‘bad’ girl. And, of course, the new girl, Ida, who has to make sense of it all. Havoc deploys these conventions with skill, creating many a funny and absurd moment; not long after she arrives, in her first PE lesson, ‘the games mistress had already berated Ida during the first drill for “not playing properly”. (How could she play properly? She hadn’t the first idea what the game was supposed to involve).’ The novel’s comic peak is the school play and the slapstick description of its farcical performance made me laugh aloud.

The novel isn’t merely played for laughs, though. Its structure, in which the chapters alternately follow Ida and a teacher, Eleanor (interspersed with fax messages from one doctor to another), add a depth of perspective to the story. The way these characters negotiate the chaos, the relationships they form to survive it, and their reasons for remaining at the school create some touching moments.

More than anything, this novel is a real page turner, and that’s due to the mystery that lies at its centre: an unidentified illness sweeping through the school’s student population. I ploughed through the chapters in no time, intrigued as to what this might be.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable read.