Studying the nuances of death with Class 9F: ThePost.ie


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Studying the nuances of death with Class 9F
Sunday, February 19, 2006 - Reviewed by Lucille Redmond
School’s Out, by Christophe Dufosse, William Heinemann, €18.95.

Perhaps we’re spoiled by American movies, with their constant urging towards conflict and climax. Literature has torn its roots out of the ground of the saga and the leisured spoken tale, and stumped after the flashing images on the screen.

At least in the Anglophone world it has. In France, less so.

School’s Out is Christophe Dufosse’s first novel, and the winner of the Prix Premier Roman (very prestigious). It will undoubtedly be very popular.

Suicide is the new black. At the beginning, our unreliable narrator, the young teacher Pierre Hoffman, observes the suicide of a friend. At the end, a group of children on a school trip . . . but that would be telling.

At the start, unnervingly, the description of the crowd around the body at the foot of the chestnut tree beneath the classroom is quite advanced when Pierre reveals that it’s not actually a dead body: ‘‘Bright scarlet foam pulsed from his ears and his mouth ...”

The young like it dark - they have a McEnroe attitude to the whole dying thing (‘‘You can not be serious?”) and find it fun to knock at death’s door and run away.

And though Dufosse was 39 when this was first published, it’s a young man’s book, with all those daring fascinations.

Pierre takes over his friend’s class of 13-year-olds, the amorphous Class 9F, who act and think as one and are impenetrable to the teachers. Shades of Lord of the Flies.

Or maybe not.

Sure, Pierre soon starts getting snuffling and sniggering anonymous phone calls. Sure, a nastily interfered-with replica of Kiki, his childhood cuddly chimp toy, turns up in the post and makes him faint.

On the other hand, as he confides, teachers are ‘‘in general much more unbalanced than the members of most other professions’’.

So in L’Heure de la Sortie - the more telling French title of School’s Out - if Class 9F have decided that they will not cooperate with the adult world, they may be in more danger than that world.

Pierre, our guide to the underworld, is particularly creepy - unfortunately, an effect that makes the book less winning than it might be.

Having followed the ambulance carrying his dead friend to the hospital, he volunteers to tell the suicide’s parents the bad news, because “. . . for fear of mumbling, I finished my sentence in a rush - ‘it’s something I’d like to experience myself’.”

As he gets to know Class 9F, as the games begin, the sinister-seeming pupils and mad teachers reveal themselves, the narrator himself comes out from under his stone, the story, or the series of stories, progresses, and the language gets more and more complicated.

Catching, isn’t it?

The story is episodic. In a series of gloom-ridden anecdotes, Capadis’ lorn Greek parents, Eric’s suicidal sister, his own big empty council flat manage to merge into a misery-guts sense of clever hopelessness.

Class 9F are strange enough: they act as one, people associated with them have died, and when one kid warns Pierre off she’s slashed in the face.

Class 9F is studying death, apparently without Pierre knowing it, and when they come to their final exam - on the school bus trip - he still hasn’t copped on to where their studies are taking them.

It’s hard to get into Dufosse’s story, because of his spiralling French prose and wandering episodic storytelling.

At the end, you can be left wondering what exactly he was trying to say - about suicide, about group psychology, about teachers and their charges.