Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas review – Malory Towers with menaces
Scarlett Thomas’s latest novel is a fast, fizzy read. Tash, the daughter of a mysterious Russian billionaire, arrives at an English boarding school. Then we’re into 224 pages of sheer audacity and voice as Tash tries to figure out who she is.
Thomas is satirically attuned to the intricate frustration of teen life, the ignoble obsessions of puerile minds and the speed at which hygiene, decorum and false pretences vanish in a single-sex boarding institution. This makes for an entertaining, irreverent and wrong-hilarious read. The girls engage in competitive anorexic narcissism (“Fruit has been specifically bred by insatiable, corrupt farmers to be full of sugar”), mortification of the flesh through sport and snobbery about local “plebs” whose tattoos are “desperate cries for help rendered in fading ink”.
The girls both enact and encounter various forms of contempt, inappropriateness, ambiguity and sleaze. The novel is full of brilliant lines and I’m deliberately not quoting the best ones, to save them for buying readers. OK, just one. Some male trauma counsellors come to visit: “Look, where do you even get two therapists who look so much like paedophiles? ...[One of them] has the eyes of a lifeguard who lets people down.”
I came to Oligarchy having devoured Thomas’s brilliant Worldquake fantasy series, similarly set in a remote town with young characters and a strange school. She is on a red-hot streak of invention right now and these narratives succeed because of the novelist’s deep understanding of the cracks and quirks of such communities. Underneath the inconsequentiality of Tash’s teenage high jinks is a barely repressed sense of panic and self-doubt. She is full of fear about returning to her old life of “people shouting at each other, but always about the wrong things”.
When Thomas slows down for a moment I am reminded how excellent her dialogue is. She expertly conveys the complexities of character through natural speech, as when Tash is advised by her worldly Aunt Sonja or has a date with a privileged guy who is at once snobbish and observant and “smelled triply of boy and man and animal”.
The text is haunted faintly by other narratives. I caught whiffs of The Virgin Suicides, The Crucible, The Bling Ring, Clueless, Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the fervour of Antonia White’s Frost in May and the anguish of Edward St Aubyn.
But these don’t stick, banished by the sheer blast of stroppy, scathing energy. This is more like Malory Towers with wifi or Sweet Valley High with the sweetness taken out. There are sinister whispers about murder, suicide, mass hysteria and tragic school folklore. But they are outweighed by the wit, which is plentiful, freewheeling and almost shocking in its callousness, like the childhood memories of when a girl “dropped acid and watched The Silence of the Lambs while the house flooded and no one did anything”.
Despite the occasional spangles of darkness, this is hugely enjoyable. It’s about as menacing as a cool girl’s black glitter nail polish – and just as much fun.
• 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 £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
