This boarding school story is anticlimactic, but I don’t mean that as a criticism. Rebecca Wait, the author of the excellent I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2022), teases the reader with the possibility of ghosts and poisonings. She even ominmously sets the story in 1984. But in the end she opts for boring old logical conclusions. The novel is all the better for it.
Like many of the best child protagonists, Ida Campbell is a neglected, emotionally abused 16-year-old stranded on a Hebridean island with a depressed mother — whose lies have made them outcasts in the community — and a horrible younger sister. Toxic family relationships appeal to Wait. In I’m Sorry You Feel That Way three siblings grapple with their depressed, resentful mother. Here, however, family takes a back seat as the protagonist escapes: Ida moves to the only boarding school that will give her a scholarship — St Anne’s, a “shelter from worldliness” for young ladies.
This set-up is sprinkled liberally with all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery. Ida arrives at St Anne’s to find the lovely watercolour painting on the prospectus is nothing like the school, which is an 18th-century haunted house-type manor with broken windows and cracked buttresses. A student once got lost on her way to geography class and was never found, Ida’s new friend Sophie tells her. Ida’s housemate Louise is said to have set a girl on fire and pushed another out of a window. The strange headmistress is Miss Christie. Agatha herself would feel at home in this place that, at first, feels rife with uneasy secrets.
The omens continue to pile up when several girls start developing a twitching disorder and are committed to hospital. The first among them, the head girl, looks as if she is going to die. A media frenzy takes off as they search for the culprit or cause. It couldn’t be the Soviets … or could it?
Wait was inspired by the outbreak of a mysterious illness in teenage girls in Le Roy, New York, in 2011 — a story that has already spawned an award-winning podcast, Hysterical, and the 2014 novel The Fever by Megan Abbott. That’s not to say her take is unwelcome. She is a master of zippy one-liners. “I’m like Icarus (ie a f***ing idiot),” the doctor James says after a catastrophic press conference. “There’s nothing wrong with being a Jew,” Diane tells Louise. “Thank you, Diane … I was thinking of killing myself but now I can see there’s no need,” Louise bites back.
By sticking to a resolutely anticlimactic plot, it allows Wait to lampoon rumour frenzies and debunk the outlandish explanations of female hysteria. She also captures a time when women’s education was often still an afterthought. The students at St Anne’s are witty and capable, but their only real teaching comes from listening to Radio 4’s Today programme.
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So it’s a shame that Wait fails to flesh out some of her characters, a mistake she also made with the mother in I’m Sorry You Feel That Way. Why is Miss Christie aloof and what is the backstory of the angry Classics teacher Vera Clarke? A gay love story appears out of nowhere with a hasty crisis and resolution. Despite these anaemic characters and the slightly twee, almost teenage tone of the writing, Havoc is nonetheless worth a read — if only for the great quips.
Havoc by Rebecca Wait (riverrun £16.99 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members