FictionReview

Bluebeard meets boarding-school comedy in a cruelly funny satire of class and eating disorders

Oligarchy is the story of Natasha, or Tash, who has been sent from Russia to a minor boarding school in Hertfordshire by the oligarch father she barely knows, having been raised in poverty by her mother. She’s a fish out of water – new money, foreign and Jewish – but bonds with her classmates over their shared passion for self-starvation. When one of their number dies, allegedly from anorexia, Tash suspects there is more to the story, and sets out to uncover the school’s dark secret.

An early reference to the girls studying Angela Carter hints at the setup: what we have here is a sort of Bluebeard-does-boarding-school comedy with elements of murder mystery. Thomas, who has written 10 novels, the best known of which is The End of Mr Y, is a writer comfortable switching between genres.

I wanted them to break out of the book and bash her with their calorie counters, to force her to see their humanity

At first it’s great fun, a knowing satire of British private schoolgirls, their snobberies and obsessions, and especially their body-image anxieties: “On Monday everyone starts a new diet. It’s Lissa’s invention. The diet is this: wholewheat bread and Sandwich Spread only.” The girls’ hatred of their own bodies is matched only by their hatred for the overweight “plebs” they see on a school trip to Stevenage. “Why are they all so fat, sir?” a pupil asks. “Because of capitalism, Lissa. Because of your fathers and what they do.” “Sir, that’s sexist! Some of our mothers might be capitalists too.”

There are some lovely lines and humorous moments. A girl’s hipbones “have started jutting out of her skirt like a cowboy’s thumbs”, a boy’s premature orgasm is “like the last moments of a fish dying on a slippery deck”, and two old ladies complain about “a dangerous communist called Jeremy Corbyn”.

Natasha’s Aunt Sonja is a particularly vivid creation. “Do everything you can to keep your beauty. Exams are not important,” she tells her niece. “When you are my age you would rather spend the day in an art gallery, or recline in a garden eating persimmons in the dusk, or lie around reading stories set in the tropics in a silk dressing gown without having to spend all your free time in fasting clinics like your father’s ex-wife does.”

No doubt the almost universal presence of anorexia and bulimia at the school has a grain of truth to it: the best satire is drawn from life. Yet there is a cruelty to Thomas’s descriptions of the girls that relies on punching down (Tiffanie, who has an eating disorder, is “like a pedigree dog with worms”), but isn’t funny enough to get away with it.

Having dislikable characters is one thing, but here they are almost held in contempt. I wanted them to break out of the book and bash the author over the head with their calorie counters to force her to see their humanity.

Thomas is a talented writer, but successfully playing body image issues for laughs requires well-rounded characters – see: Bridget Jones, Louise Rennison’s Georgia Nicolson – and I do wish she’d shown her girls some of the kindness that they refuse to show themselves. Oligarchy is billed as a book for adults but at times it reads more like young adult fiction (Thomas also writes children’s books). However, I wouldn’t want this getting into the hands of any young woman with eating problems, so crammed is it with references to weights, BMIs and dieting methods. The author has written of her own obsessive issues around eating, how she has “more than 100 different food rules”, and about her sadness at seeing two teenage girls discussing weight loss, so surely she must know this? By the end I began to feel quite fat and miserable myself.

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Tash, meanwhile, perhaps out of an authorial fear of cultural insensitivity, hardly seems Russian at all. Because of this, the novel’s title feels misplaced, though we are, I think, supposed to draw a parallel between the dark hierarchies rife in teenage girldom and those of shadowy Russian billionaires.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel as though the writer is invested enough in her characters or the novel’s various narrative strands to really hold it together: the legend of Princess Augusta, the wife of the school’s founder, and her black diamond fails to coalesce with Tash’s quest, in what is ultimately a rushed and unsatisfactory resolution to the mystery.

Thomas clearly knows how to craft a very funny sentence, and has profound insight into the issues she is writing about, but I was left not knowing quite what this book is, or to whom I’d recommend it. Certainly not to teenage girls, or to any adult who likes them.

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas is published by Canongate (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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