Sean,
whose mother died young and whose father is usually inside – and that does not
mean in the house, has been brought up fairly conventionally by his
grandparents. His only eventual inheritance is his grandfather’s snooker cue.
Dan, on the other hand, is from a professional family with a large car and a
detached house. Daniel’s mother has the same vowels as everyone else, but she
is also beautiful and made up to be different. She adopts a few airs and graces
to keep the world at bay. The two lads, however, forge a pragmatic friendship.
Both are academically gifted. They might just get to Oxford.
Sean
does just that. He reads history and literature and develops what becomes a
lifelong interest bordering on obsession with an Elizabethan group centred on
Sir Walter Raleigh. Their name, The School of Night, gives the book its title
and also figures in a rather opaque and otherwise perhaps inconsequential line
in a Shakespeare play. Further research leads Sean to a quest into the
authorship of Shakespeare’s work. He cannot accept that a man whose daughter
remained illiterate could have authored such work. Sean seems to forget the
example of his own origins, or perhaps he might be rejecting them? Of this we
are never sure.
Daniel,
on the other hand, does not make it to Oxford. He doesn’t get the grades and
decides to stay on at school for an extra year to improve his scores. The
friends are thus separated. Dan never makes it to university. He abandons
school, enters the family business in perishables, takes up with the girl that
Sean left behind, marries her, has children and builds businesses,
successfully.
Sean
drifts into a steady if undemanding job as a researcher in the BBC while Dan
builds his mansions. Sean takes up with Dominique and soft gates open into the
promise of a new life only to close again for familiar reasons. He continues to
meander through the intellectual challenges presented by his study of The
School of Night and the identity of William Shakespeare while his own life
itself meanders from one day to the next. Dan, meanwhile, makes more money,
pots of it, and intervenes occasionally. We know early on, by the way, that Dan
has died, leaving Sean an immense sense of loss.
As
the characters’ lives unfold, the reader begins to expect some form of
resolution of the book’s multiple and apparently disparate themes. The School
of Night, Sir Walter Raleigh, Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, literature,
history, sexual awakening, education, social class, friendship, loyalty,
Bradford, they all mingle without ever really forcing a mix. Surely there will
be some significant event that creates a synthesis powerful enough to round off
this admixture of elements into a single, plot-forming whole. But Alan Wall is
far too good a writer to stoop to such banality. These are characters who
retain their interests because they are interested in them, not because they
can be made to serve some cheap literary trick.
When
Sean is made redundant by the BBC, Dan reappears in his life with an offer he
cannot refuse. New, previously only imagined realities unfold and an
occasional, sometimes disturbing truth surfaces. But Sean realises it is better
not to ask questions. It is amazing what we will do to help a friend, even if
the friend might not deserve the attention, let alone the required and
inevitably assumed devotion.
The
School of Night is about deception and eventual resolution via discovery. We
interpret any situation only with knowledge currently available and inevitably
there remains much that remains unknown, even about ourselves, let alone our
closest friends and acquaintances, let alone shady figures from history. The
School of Night seems to be a novel about doubt and our insatiable desire to
resolve it, always with at best only partial success.
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