The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
My rating: ★★✰✰✰ (2 stars)
The premise itself was enough to intrigue me. A close-knit group of friends attending Oxford? Yes please. Naomi Alderman’s style lends itself well for this: it has a ‘polish’ that evokes notions of privilege. However, the characters and plot do not convey the good qualities of Alderman’s style. Throughout, there is a sort of entitlement which feels hollow: Oxford is not the forefront of the story, and it is the annoying attitude of the characters which render this novel so self-important rather than the ‘exclusive’ setting. The Lessons lacks the compelling characters of The Secret History, the atmosphere of The Likeness, and the dramatics of If We Were Villains.
The focus of the novel isn’t as clear-cut as I expected. For such a short novel, I found my interest wavering time and again due to the lack of the story’s focus: Oxford seems forgotten soon after the first few intriguing chapters and Mark’s house also becomes seemingly forgotten. Alderman doesn’t spend enough time maintaining the background of this novel and the characters are not fleshed out enough as to detract from this. I would have been forgiving if I could at least have read about a decent character study, but there was no such thing. This ‘group of friends’ was composed of interchangeable characters who were so poorly developed that even the author is aware of it and tries to excuse her poor rendition of them by having the narrator say things like ‘so and so is still a mystery to me’ and ‘no one ever understood what she/he was about’. Really? That is a cheap trick. Her characters aren’t unknowable as they claim to be, but rather, they simply lack, in all fronts. They are shallows sketches who do not even appear that often in the novel. And I wouldn’t have minded as much if at least the two ‘main’ characters were fully developed. But they weren’t. Their relationship was…questionable. We saw no proof or progress, but we are made to believe that the protagonist falls under the influence of this very charismatic character who is anything but interesting. They all read like copies of the cast of *ahem* The Secret History *ahem*. What was the point of it all?
Lastly, the ‘Italian’ factor of this novel is complete nonsense. At least google real Italian names for Pete’s sake.
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