It exposes the lives of six people who attend a school in Oxford either as student or teacher. The narrator of the story, a middle-aged man of means, is almost as enigmatic as his subject, North, a strange, elegant, charismatic Anglo-American youth.
The handsome, precocious North begins a three-way relationship between himself, a beautiful 27 year-old woman teacher, and a young married, but bisexual, head of Physics who is good-looking, athletic and evangelically Christian. As the novel proceeds in various settings, Oxford, London, Ravello, Washington DC, a confidential intimacy evolves between the narrator and North and the suspense mounts as North reveals his plans for systematic seduction.
The players in the game of love become entangled in sexual anarchy that accelerates the novel towards its decisive, cataclysmic climax.
At the end there is an abiding mystery and an acute sense of potent evil. The reader is left wondering if there have been certain moral imperatives that have made the narrator tell less than the whole truth.
- ISBN10 0230007384
- ISBN13 9780230007383
- Publish Date 7 April 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 June 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Imprint Macmillan New Writing
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 99
- Language English