Sixteen-year-old Ida flees a family scandal in Scotland for St. Anne’s, a girls’ boarding school on the south coast of England. She discovers that the dilapidated school is on its last legs, a dying remnant of an earlier age, but she’s willing to put up with crumbling masonry, disgusting fish pies, and an especially ill-tempered and mysterious roommate to avoid the opprobrium at home. But then a mysterious illness sweeps through the students, characterized by twitches and fits, throwing St. Anne’s into the public spotlight. Is it a pandemic of hysteria, an environmental catastrophe, or a nefarious poisoning plot?
Cry Havoc is a highly entertaining, and surprisingly affecting, ride through a backwater school set in 1984, with a headmistress obsessed with nuclear Armageddon (there are frequent bomb shelter drills, and the students have been made to watch “Threads” (no one should be made to watch threads …)) and an intriguing cast of characters. We spend most of our time with Ida and with geography teacher Eleanor, who feels that the best parts of her life are in her past. When the girls’ mysterious fits begin, we also spend time with Dr. James Halliwell, who sends faxes to another doctor (and apparent former lover) about the challenges of determining the source of the maladies.
This is the sort of book that can be enjoyed sentence by sentence, the story unfolding at a steady pace with strongly voiced characters and occasional well-staged set pieces (the disastrous school play is Wodehouse levels of hilarious), until you suddenly slam into an emotionally devastating moment. Themes of deceit run through the story — no one is giving a straight story at any point — and the characters’ motivations are often murky, even to themselves. The book’s conclusion is hardly tidy — considering that none of its characters are, that’s not surprising — but is wholly satisfying. Certainly one of my favorite books of the year so far.
Leave a Reply