Girls uninterrupted
T
Through two different time schemes, in fragmentary scenes shuffled together like a pack of playing cards, Catton juxtaposes the aftershocks of an affair between a high-school student and her music teacher with the local drama school's appropriation of the scandal for a theatre project. As well as darting about chronologically, the narrative makes surprising leaps in register and tone, so that characters speak in a mixture of world-weary teenspeak, pitch-perfect realism, and mannered theatricality, sometimes within the same scene.
"I require of all my students," says the saxophone teacher who acts as audience and foil for her pupils' passions throughout, "that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom ... If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong." The mother to whom she's speaking, meanwhile, responds with social platitudes quite at odds with the teacher's fierce poetic rhythms.
It could have been precious at best, pretentious at worst, but Catton uses these jarring registers to shocking, funny and poignant effect; the theatrical declamations give expression to the submerged undercurrents of teenage life, allowing characters to articulate unspoken fears, desires and social codes as well as embodying the drama of adolescence itself. Characters play each other; props are employed; scenes are provided with background lighting and music; so that as the book progresses it is hard to tell whether episodes are fantasy, memory, tableaux from the theatre production or scenes from the real-life drama it is based upon. The coming-of-age novel usually strives for sincerity; in setting herself thrillingly free from the rules of realism, Catton cuts to the heart of emotional truths behind the social facade, exploring issues of intimacy and power, innocence and experience, performance and authenticity.
The illicit relationship between Victoria and Mr Saladin remains as mysterious to us as it does to her seething classmates, furious at being excluded from this new realm of adult privacy; instead, Catton concentrates on Bridget, "pale and stringy and rumpled and thoroughly secondary"; Victoria's younger sister, Isolde; and outsider Julia, "a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls", the butt of "frightened vicious rumours that she is possibly probably gay".
The three girls describe the school's gossip, rumours and counselling sessions for the benefit of their sax teacher, who acts to bring Julia and Isolde together while dwelling on her own unrequited love for Patsy, a character who is made present in the novel only through imagination, memory and desire. Meanwhile, in the book's other strand, Stanley enlists at drama school, subjecting himself to the institute's breaking and remaking of its students. (Teaching throughout is a predatory activity, a discomfitingly intense power-play of which the affair is only the most extreme case. )
Catton uses the notion of performance explicitly investigated in Stanley's thread to probe the roleplay and rituals of adolescent girls, their taboos, hierarchies and masquerades. "Girls were always acting," Stanley thinks, looking around at his fellow students. "Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance." The schoolgirls try on different identities, borrowing each other's secrets, inching self-consciously towards their adult selves through a series of rehearsed, formalised poses; and acting as an avid audience for any slipup among their peers, such as Victoria's secret affair or Julia and Isolde's maverick desires.
There is so much to enjoy and admire in this book: a razor-sharp sense of her characters' self-love; a wonderful ear for the rhythms of language, both everyday and heightened; a generous apprehension of the power and processes of theatre and music; a fond comedy of the ridiculousness of teachers (especially the "hopping and red-faced and puffing" Miss Clark, demonstrating the flexibility of condoms by stretching one over her sensible shoe). And, of course, dazzling authorial control. It's astounding that The Rehearsal was written by a 22-year-old, though fitting that this talented young writer should evoke so well the charged emotional landscape before adult compromise, when a girl's ambition and desire are not yet "circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt"; when it feels as though anything is possible.
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