Even if it wasn\u2019t perched on a cliff on the south coast, the position of St Anne\u2019s, Eastbourne \u2013 the decaying girls\u2019 school that is the setting for Rebecca Wait\u2019s gleefully macabre new novel, Havoc \u2013 might reasonably be described as precarious. Deeply eccentric, staffed by the barely employable, and permanently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, St Anne\u2019s hangs on, against all the odds. And then, in 1984, Ida Campbell\u00a0turns up on the doorstep, in\u00a0possession of a full scholarship and\u00a0rather a lot of baggage.<\/p>\n
Sixteen years old and already an\u00a0outcast, Ida is in flight from her hapless mother, her foul-tempered sister, the small community in the Western Isles to which they have been\u00a0transplanted, and the nameless scandal that has ruined their lives. St\u00a0Anne\u2019s is to be Ida\u2019s salvation, but it\u00a0soon dawns on her that the school might not be quite the refuge she had\u00a0hoped for.<\/p>\n
The school\u2019s buildings were constructed by a Victorian lunatic. Its\u00a0principal, Miss Christie, is a dusty combination of cold war paranoiac and\u00a0Edwardian governess, insisting both on regular drills in preparation for nuclear attack and the importance of girls wearing their hair up. The rest\u00a0of the staff, from lugubrious bluestocking teacher Vera Clarke (Classics) to \u201cLoopy Linda\u201d the English\u00a0mistress, are antique, creepy,\u00a0despairing or all three.<\/p>\n
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls\u2019 school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The exception \u2013 and one of our narrative guides through the mayhem \u2013 is geography teacher Eleanor Alston, clinging to hope and sanity as she approaches 40 in the aftermath of a failed love affair. Into this stagnant pool of scholarship is dropped the replacement for the late Miss Hamilton (history, ancient), the meek but regrettably presentable Matthew Langfield, an improbable ex-Westminster schoolmaster and St\u00a0Anne\u2019s first and only male teacher, and ripples ensue.<\/p>\n
Ida\u2019s fellow students, having largely been deposited by parents indifferent to the school\u2019s underwhelming reputation and keen only not to be bothered with details, are a restless bunch, prone to smooches, cliques, gossip (Cindy Riley, in the works shed, with the groundsman?) and outbreaks of insubordination. They have their queen bee, Diane Fulbrook, the dazzling head girl with ambitions to be\u00a0a police officer; and their bad fairy, Louise Adler (almost certainly some relation to Irene, Sherlock Holmes\u2019s rival). Louise is the school\u2019s only Jewish pupil and spoken of in whispers; she has pushed one girl out\u00a0of a window and set another on fire\u00a0at the Tea Cosy cafe, and Ida has\u00a0barely learned of her existence when\u00a0she is told that they will be roommates. Then Diane is taken ill with a progressive neurological disorder that defies medical investigation. When, one by one, her\u00a0fellow students develop similar symptoms, and diagnoses from demonic possession and Soviet poisonings to mass hysteria begin to circulate, inevitably suspicion falls on\u00a0the newest arrivals.<\/p>\n
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls\u2019 school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect. There are welcome echoes of St Trinian\u2019s \u2013 the shade of\u00a0Alastair Sim hovers over the staffroom, comforting and anarchic at\u00a0once \u2013 and there is abundant Ealing\u00a0comedy in the madcap chases\u00a0through school corridors and machinations in the lighting gallery during the school play. Yet beneath the\u00a0comedy lies a distinctly unsettling undertone: the girls experience a convincingly visceral terror that edges\u00a0towards Shirley Jackson territory and\u00a0gives their hysteria an extra dimension. This, along with a\u00a0genuine unexpectedness in the characterisation and a lot of very funny dialogue, loosens things up and brings real originality to the game. Combined with excellent pacing, a plot so deliciously thick you could stand a\u00a0spoon up in it, and the boldness required to splice a darker thread into the narrative, it all adds up to a thoroughly satisfying contribution to a\u00a0happily capacious genre.<\/p>\n