The Rehearsal

Reading this debut novel was like sitting in a black box theatre watching a play, suspended in time, and often like watching a rehearsal of the play that I am watching. As the characters move into focus, the lighting techniques add a perspective to the dialog. Just like a play's story is told through dialog; lighting; and movement (called blocking in theater lingo), Catton's novel coheres and communicates through the visible frame of a theatre lens; the boundaries of the theatre are the boundaries of the narrative technique that she employed to tell this story. Any action that is not possible within the constraints of a stage is not part of the immediate action of the novel. In lesser hands, this could have gotten weary for the reader. However, it felt like Catton effortlessly exhaled this novel. The theme of escaping yourself--of desperately wanting to be someone else--is a context of narrative construction as well as foundation for the story. The story takes place between three neighboring groups of students. The Drama Institute is a drama college for aspiring actors, and the girls' high school, Abbey Grange, is an elite private school. The music school rounds out the settings of this novel. The sax teacher, a female of unknown identity, is often seen in shadow or startling light. Speaking of identity, only first or last names are identified, all except for one replacement teacher, Jean Critchley, who came on board when music teacher Mr. Saladin was let go. He had a scandalous affair with Victoria, one of the girls from Abbey Grange. This affair is the centerpiece story, from which all other stories, themes, and actions unfold. The abbreviated names personify the characters and their motivations in shadow for much of the story. This is a cloistered world where arch teenagers say cruel things to each other and communicate through a pecking order. The most genetically sparkling are the most popular, and deviance is not tolerated (although desired). Reality is less authentic than truth, insist the acting teachers. Truth is uncovered and dislodged via a staged experience. The Theater of Cruelty is an exercise taught to first year drama students that both perverts and illuminates the human boundaries and boundlessness of ambition and fear. The sax teacher speaks with a frank and flinty tongue to intrusive stage mothers and manipulates her students into shocking reenactments of her own past desires. Julia, (earmarked as the deviant ) and Isolde, (the beloved and in vogue), two of her students from the high school, feel caged by their status. Additionally, the students envy Isolde's sister, Victoria, because she was desired by an adult. She is now a celebrated victim. The sax teacher taps into their confusion and pulls their emotional strings, inwardly avid as they puppet her predilections. The acting teachers, known mainly as The Head of Acting and The Head of Movement, seek out favorite students who are reinventions of their

The Rehearsal is a supremely confident debut that is all the more astonishing when one learns that its author, Eleanor Catton, is barely out of her teen years herself. Set in an elite drama school, music studio, and a neighboring high school, the book is a close-up look at the self-conscious agony of those who are on the cusp of adulthood, focusing particularly on an affair between a music teacher and a teenage girl. Right from the start, the reader is aware that this is not going to be a "business as usual" type of book. One of the first characters we meet is the saxophone teacher who, we learn enjoys the "strange satisfaction that is got by saying something that nobody hears." She tells one mother, "I require of all my students that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom." The novel narrows its focus on two students in particular: Isolde, whose sister, Victoria, is at the center of the teacher-student scandal, and Stanley, a sensitive drama student whose father (a psychiatrist) is too fond of pedophilia jokes. They are damaged, as is every student in this narrative. The saxophone teacher says, "You want to be damaged. All of you. That is the one quality all my students have in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely." The Rehearsal soars when it explores the masks we wear, the roles we play, and the templates we use to "fake" emotions. Again from the saxophone teacher: "If you were not mothers, and if you were looking very carefully, you might be able to see a role, a character and also a person struggling to maintain that character..." And again: "You will see exactly what you want to see and nothing more." This theme is brilliantly explored and realized on at least two levels. The drama student Stanley must constantly pretend to be someone else as an actor (in one exercise, he goes into the world for the afternoon, pretending to be Joe Pitt); simultaneously, he pretends in his personal life, using well-worn templates to learn to feel and to "act as if." Ultimately, ALL the characters are performers -- the saxophone teacher, the students, Stanley's one-dimension father -- and the reader finds himself or herself as a member of the audience, watching the action unfold, determining what is true and what is not. Saturated with sexual tension, bursting with insights, and focusing on explorations of identity and longing, this is a book that is seeking to pave new territory. The saxophone teacher says, "Remember that these years...are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after." I finished the last page in amazement that a debut author this young could have gotten everything so RIGHT.

A flippant title, perhaps, for a review of this brilliant book, except that flippancy is Eleanor Catton's weapon of choice in tackling some very serious subjects. In alternating chapters, her first novel follows the lives of a group of girls at Abbey Grange, a private New Zealand high school, and of a boy named Stanley in his first year at drama school. Although the two threads take a long time to connect up in plot terms, their common concern is obvious: that sexual education in adolescence involves more than physical experience and emotional response, but also the whole question of personal identity and role-playing. Life becomes a stage on which to deliver well-worn lines or frantically improvise, where even the actors have trouble distinguishing what is real. The catalyst for the girls is a saxophone teacher to whom many of them go for private lessons. This unnamed woman has a gloriously irreverent voice, saying to one of the mothers, for example: "I require of all my students that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom." Or perhaps thinking this rather than saying it; one of the glories of the book is that everybody seems to be on a truth serum, coming out with thoughts that would probably never be spoken in public. Or seeing through a lie to the truth behind it, as when a woman talks about her husband: "I'll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I'll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I'll panic and blurt out, I love you. I'm always motivated by the oddest things." Early in the book, there is a scandal at Abbey Grange. The band teacher, Mr. Saladin, is accused of abusing a pupil and forced to resign. Group counseling sessions are arranged for all those closest to the perhaps-willing victim. The counselor talks of harassment as a form of control, but one girl objects: "I don't agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control. Sleeping with a minor isn't exciting because you get to boss them around. It's exciting because you're risking so much... because you might lose." This sensible but subversive viewpoint is typical of the book as a whole, almost every page of which manages to turn received wisdom on its head, whether in outrageous contradiction or gentle parody. As an example of the latter, here is the younger sister of the abused girl telling the sax teacher what she learned in counseling: "We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time. You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can't really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no." The truth of the last sentence does little to excuse the well-intentioned psychic time-bombs that precede it. I have to admit that this book might almost have been written f

If you are the type of person who wants their novels to start at the beginning, build character and plot before coming to a satisfying "they all lived happily ever after" ending, then avoid this book at all costs. You will hate it. But I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a book as much as this one. For a first novel, it is ambitious, daring and complex, and yet it works beautifully. I would not be surprised if this wins a number of awards this year - it has all the ingredients that the award-givers seem to love. The basis for the story is a scandal at a school involving a music teacher, Mr Saladin, and Victoria, the elder sister of one of the main characters, Isolde. This impact of this event is viewed both from the point of view of the girls at the school, and also as the basis for an end of year drama production by the local drama Institute. The two stories start separately, but inevitably mesh as the book progresses. The drama school bit is arguably a bit of a stretched conceit, but this is forgivable as the author explores the concepts of reality and performance. But this is just one of the aspects of this book. Was the errant Mr Saladin any worse than the dark and mysterious "saxophone teacher" whose attempts to control and interfere with her charges appears at times more sinister than Mr Saladin's sexual urges. But her habit of speaking exactly what she thinks is hilarious at times. And the author's psychological insights into the fears of teenagers growing up are beautifully observed. And how does the media (in this case a play) reflect reality - and does reality exist - and how much of it is performance (as Shakespeare once noted), and so much more.... There's dark humour aplenty mixed with the fears and excitement of growing up. It is a very difficult book to describe - the voices sound real in an unreal way. The closest I can get to explaining it is a line given by the Head of Acting at the drama Institute who likens plays to the ancient Greek god statues - they are not meant to be representative but they allow you a point of access that seems real. If that sounds pretentious mumbo-jumbo, that is what makes this book so excellent - it is such a complex tapestry of a story that it could easily have come over as pseudo-high brow and pretentious, but it doesn't largely because it's told with humour and sympathy. The characters, while not all likeable, are all easy to sympathise with and all are clearly drawn. It's not an easy book to start, but after ten pages, I was hooked and it's the kind of book that you can re-read and get more out of. And the more you read, the more it rings in your head, like a piece of classical music the phrases and stories are inter-woven. I can see why some will hate this book (there is little in the way of direct narrative, the time scenes jump around, and some of the voices are far from naturalistic, and the ending is a little anti-climactic), but it is one of the most innovative and intricate books I've