But who could have taken out the contract on Gaelle and Lukas? Urged on by a guilty conscience, the penitent Michael vows to find out. Gaelle, meanwhile, is confined to a psychiatric hospital, where she is interrogated by the police, who believe she tried to kill Lukas and then failed to take her own life. Unfortunately, Roy has no way of knowing what the reader learns in the first few pages, which is that Rebecca Buckfast has already committed two murders – “one a crime of passion, the other a crime of convenience” – and that she has come to St Oswald’s with a very modern ambition, that of stripping it of “all its history, with all its relentless, patriarchal baggage”. The fusty surroundings of St Oswald’s provide the perfect setting for A Narrow Door, which is a deliciously old-fashioned novel that proceeds in the epistolary style, with Roy and Rebecca recording their growing antagonism in diary and letter. But then a corpse is discovered on the school grounds, a development that doesn't seem to surprise Ms Buckfast, nor worry her unduly.
All of which constitutes a disaster, as far as the misogynistic Roy is concerned. (Although, Roy being Roy, he would probably remind us at this point that Canute was being ironic, and was trying to demonstrate the futility of trying to hold back the waves.)Ī Narrow Door (Orion, £19.99), the third novel to feature Roy Straitley after Different Class (2016), begins with Roy largely submerged, and drowning rather than waving: not only has St Oswald's appointed Rebecca Buckfast as its first headmistress in its 500-year history, but its previously narrow doors have been thrown so wide that even girls can now file through as pupils. First introduced by Joanne Harris in Gentlemen and Players (2005), Roy teaches classics at St Oswald’s grammar school for boys, and revels in his role as a kind of King Canute vainly attempting to stem the tide of progress.
We hear a lot about the “likability” of fictional characters these days, a concept that Roy Straitley would likely dismiss as the worst kind of millennial tosh.
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