East Markham Book Club
A Narrow Door
by Joanne Harris
by Joanne Harris
Now I'm in charge, the gates are my gates. The rules are my rules.
It's an incendiary moment for St Oswald's school. For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls.
Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered.
But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She'll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. After all...
You can't keep a good woman down.
Next Meeting Sunday 17th September 2023 at 7.30pm
Club Opinion
At the September meeting we discussed A Narrow Door by Joanne Harris. This is the last of a trio of novels by Harris that are set in St Oswald’s Grammar School. Despite this, it works as a standalone book, and I don’t think anything was lost from not having read the first two.
There were mixed views on the book – as with last month’s choice, no one was particularly enamoured with any of the characters (well, perhaps there was a slight soft-spot for Roy Straitley) and it wasn’t immediately obvious that the book was written as dialogue between two narrators (Straitley and Rebecca Buckfast) with each chapter flagged with a chess piece (White King and Black Queen) to show who’s voice it was.
The overall theme of the book was gender and a woman’s role in society at that point in time (and still relevant today), but there were other themes running through, including memory, trauma, identity and perception, grief, secrets and the struggle between the old and the new. Rather a lot to keep on top of!
It was an interesting and thought-provoking read, if you got into the rhythm Harris created, but the majority found the characters too remote to feel any empathy with and as a result, we gave it three stars.
