A Brit walks into a European School just before Brexit

James Leader latest novel, Into Babel, offers a fictional take on a world the author has come to know first-hand: the EU bubble in Luxembourg.

The story follows Hugh Beech, whose name lends itself to mispronunciation and who secures a job as an English teacher at the European School of Luxembourg.

Following a deep culture shock, and with the ever-present threat of Brexit in the background, the young Brit embarks upon a journey into the alluring and revolting world of EU institutions, bureaucracy, and their rules or lack thereof.

First novel about European Schools

The novel’s author, James Leader is an English-Luxembourgish writer, European School teacher and winner of the 2016 Luxembourg National Literary Competition with his young adult novel The Venus Zone.

“I’d been probably considering a novel about the school for 15 years and I started writing it five years ago, with some big gaps in between, letting it sit and rest, and then coming back to it and rewriting it,” he told the Luxembourg Times. The book evolved from “fairly satirical to more character-based” in those years, he said.

The novel’s four sections are mainly “geographically determined,” said Leader. The book doesn’t confine itself to Luxembourg but also includes an emotionally charged visit to Strasbourg and a wild road trip to the south of Spain.

Throughout the story, Hugh encounters some memorable characters. Seventeen-year-old Vesna, who is trying to come into her own; Ginevra, a bon-vivant and seductress in her 50s, and Bertie M., a cynical teacher in his late 60s who nonetheless enjoys an all-around cool status at the school, are the people who will most transform Hugh’s outlook on life.

“The European School struck me as a microcosm of all EU institutions, yet it has never been done before,” Leader said about the novel’s setting. “There’s a lot of interesting cultural differences, tensions and miscomprehensions” in a school full of different nationalities.

Into Babel is published by Black Fountain Press © Photo credit: Sandra Packard

“I think those international schools are quite interesting environments. It also reflects more and more how we are all living, because we’re so globalised. It’s a little world where people have come together and they’re trying to get on despite their cultural differences.”

Humour and identity

In all that, humour is a key ingredient for Leader who said he was “inspired by Catch-22, a really stringent comedy, but more like an E.M. Forster novel, in that voice and emotion play a big role as well. It’s very much reflecting upon the tradition of the comic novel in English as well.”

Teetering between love and hate for the EU institutions, school and his new adoptive country, Hugh Beech will have to decide where to put down his roots, and a clue is in the name.

“I always tell everyone (who cares to listen) that Luxembourg has the best beech forests in Europe,” said Leader. “I run in beech forests every day. I have written a poem in High Talk about ‘The beech trees of the Grengewald’. Beeches represent for me the glory of Luxembourg. Perhaps unconsciously, I was rooting Hugh in Luxembourg.”

Identity – and how it can be like Russian nestling dolls, one wrapped inside the other – plays a central role. “I wanted to represent identity as an addition, and not as subtraction,” said the author, who, having taught all around the world and mastering several languages, knows a thing or two about multiple and complex identities.

“It’s funny, it’s not experimental or overly difficult. It’s an entertaining read with a strong narrative and real settings, which I love to write about. I hope the readers will like the main character, and his progression from a highly educated but quite poor English background to his encounter with glamour, money and sophistication,” Leaders summed up Into Babel.

The novel is available in most Luxembourg bookstores or can be ordered directly from the publisher, Black Fountain Press.