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Novel set in SCOTLAND

8th May 2021

Madam by Phoebe Wynne, novel set in Scotland.

Rose Christie, young Classics teacher, secures a job at Caldonbrae Hall, a boarding school for girls set in an ancestral castle in remote Scotland.  It is something of an achievement as Caldonbrae Hall has had an unrivalled reputation for over a hundred years and Rose, at only 26, has been offered the position of Head of Classics.  Rose is worried about leaving her ailing mother but is encouraged not to miss out on this excellent opportunity.  She quickly discovers, however, that it’s extremely difficult for her to fit in to this elitist and ultra-traditional institution.  She does her best but she is surrounded by secrecy and struggles to cope with the students who seem to be most unlike any teenagers she has known, being completely uninterested in the modern world and obsessed with their finishing school-type lessons.  Rose is a proud feminist and finds the girls’ obsession with procuring a good marriage hard to swallow.

It also doesn’t take long for Rose to suspect that there is something suspicious about her predecessor’s sudden departure from the school. As she begins to investigate this, she gradually unearths the real function of the school and starts to understand the lengths that the powers-to-be will go to keep the school’s secrets and prevent Rose revealing the truth.  It would make sense for her to leave but she is trapped there, both physically by the ever-locked school gates and ever-vigilant ground staff and emotionally because the school has taken over the care of her mother by paying for a costly nursing home.

Madam has been described as a Gothic novel and it certainly has the setting for it with the grim interior of the ancient castle complete with hidden passages, creaky doors and dimly lit passages and weather which is at best inclement and at worst downright dangerous.

The blurb for Madam promised much – it’s a pretty sure-fire recipe, after all, but unfortunately it rather failed in the delivery.  It’s set in the 1990s but the characters, the speech patterns, the attitudes and values are completely anachronistic and feel more like the 1890s.  Elements of the plot stretch the reader’s suspension of disbelief to the limit too – a school that takes on the complete financial care and support of its staff’s relatives, that singularly fails to deliver in terms of anything other than preparation for marriage but seems to stay in unrivalled position in terms of reputation but, above all, a complete school full of teenage girls (and their parents) who have whole-heartedly signed up to this archaic system.

The author’s influences are clear.  Madam owes much to Jane Eyre and a fair bit to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – an uneasy combination at best.  The bits of Madam that really worked for me were the parts which reflected the author’s own experience as a Classics teacher, the scenes where the central character, quite well-rounded and believable, uses her knowledge of Greek and Roman women to begin to be an influence on the girls.  The structural device of introducing chapters with a classical tale was effective too.  And then, for a lengthy book, it keeps up a steady pace and doesn’t flag and that’s not easy to achieve. There’s a good writer in here.  She just needs to chuck aside her influences a bit more and stick with what she knows.

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

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