Different Class by Joanne Harris – review

The author of Chocolat revisits St Oswald’s for a twisting thriller with an unerring eye for school life

If you’re suffering from a surfeit of psychological thrillers about dysfunctional women this summer post- Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and their ilk, then you could do a lot worse than turn to Joanne Harris’s latest, Different Class. The follow-up to 2005’s Gentlemen and Players, it’s set in a second-rate boys’ grammar school in the north of England and is a magnificently plotted and twisty journey to the heart of a 24-year-old crime, as well as a darkly humorous look at the march of progress in a 500-year-old institution.

Harris’s main narrator is Latin master Roy Straitley, a St Oswald’s man born and bred, “sixty six on Bonfire Night, with a hundred and two terms under my fast-expanding belt”. Prone to Latin epithets, he wears a battered old gown covered in chalk dust and tea stains, is fond of Liquorice Allsorts and Gauloises, and enjoys a regular “modest libation” in the local pub, the Thirsty Scholar. Straitley and his colleagues – some institutions at St Oswald’s like him, others younger, newer, and even (gasp) female – are recovering from the events of Gentlemen and Players, and debating the arrival of the new headmaster who is being parachuted in to save them from the scandal.

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