Private horrors

At the boarding school in Colin McAdam’s
Fall, things go very wrong

by JULIET WATERS

I'm not surprised when Colin McAdam tells me he has mostly good memories of the three years he spent at Ashbury College, the Ottawa boarding school on which he loosely based his second novel, Fall, even though the dark world he creates is one Id rather read about than live in.

I'm guessing McAdam had the most essential high school survival skill: the ability to totally get the point of view of whatever culture he's in. Exhibit A: I met McAdam a couple of years ago at one of those evenings where people like me get drunk and ponder questions like, what should we tell kids about God? A week before my son, then six, had asked me whether there were sports stadiums in heaven. Yeah, sure, Id replied, without thinking, never expecting the next question: So, where does the visiting team come from?

Were it not for Colin McAdam, I never would've learned the perfect answer: Toronto.

This seems to me such a quintessentially Montreal punch line, that McAdam is forever cemented in my brain as a Montrealer. It doesn't matter how many times I read that he grew up in Hong Kong, Denmark, England and Barbados as the son of a diplomat. When we meet again, I still end up asking him so where did you grow up in Montreal?

Neither of the two narrators of Fall seems to have this same chameleon talent, even through they're both sons of diplomats. Noel, the son of the Canadian

Consul General to Australia, claims that the children of diplomats become good mimics. But mimicry is the best he can accomplish on those days when he's not being just plain awkward and more than a little creepy.

Julius, on the other hand, is the son of the American ambassador to Canada. He glides through life, liked by everyone, taking it for granted that his is the culture that everyone else is adapting to. He registers enough about his environment to successfully master it. But he's unlikely to ever describe it in more detail than this snippet from his syncopated interior dialogue: Chapel: Bong! La la la la la, England, Jesus, Canada, Jesus, Jesus. So it makes sense that he would barely notice Noels increasingly dangerous obsession with him.

McAdams motivation for writing Fall was never to expose the culture of boarding schools. Instead of looking at boarding school as some sort of place where social engineering takes place, or terrible things, like sodomy, and all sorts of things like that I intended it to be just a place where certain people gather and things go wrong.

Very wrong. At one level, Fall stays close to all the usual rituals of a place where mostly teenage boys dominate (there are 30 girls out of 114 boarders). There are all the normal, if extreme, obsessions with sex and scatological pranks. But it becomes increasingly clear, especially when Julius's girlfriend goes missing, that there is something more deeply dysfunctional here than culture.

What that is evades an easy answer. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the easy psychological profiles. Or even the complex ones. Its just a big, meaty mess, life. There's nothing predictable about it. Yeah, sometimes you can point to certain ways of life, and certain types of characters, and have some idea. But its never true or completely accurate.

Fall has all the tension of a carefully constructed Patricia Highsmith novel, but at the same time, there's an ease to it, a messiness that works. Despite the violence of their drives, the teenagers in this novel feel like teenagers, talk like teenagers, think like teenagers.

No novel is ever a completely true representation of its setting, but Fall feels eerily close to the truth. And while the answers it provides to some of the mysteries it raises may not be direct, for some reason they still feel right.

FALL BY COLIN MCADAM, HAMISH
HAMILTON, HC, 358 PP., $32