A cross between Tom Brown's School Days and Lord of the Flies, School Days explores the hierarchical world of the public school system in the forties. Dark and powerful, this novel lays bare the unspeakable cruelties that many have faced at boarding schools over the years.
Seven apprehensive thirteen-year-olds enter a famous Public School as members of Ansell’s, the most prestigious House. The reader is inducted with them into claustrophobic, arcane, degenerated traditions which educate them intellectually, morally and sexually into ruined senior boys who precipitate the shocking tragedy and its shameful aftermath which still haunts the narrator.
Frighteningly convincing, uncompromisingly explicit, this portrayal of an outwardly revered institution inwardly corrupt with misplaced loyalty, complacency and arrogance, makes us ponder the integrity of those who, educated like these boys, dominated Government and the Establishment during the last decades of the twentieth century.
“A remarkable achievement, a vivid drama recovered from the past with chilling, brooding determination. The story has the feel and texture of one that has lain dormant for decades, waiting for the kiss of life that is the business of the novelist. I read it straight through during two days in hospital. Like that Wordsworthian crag, seen at night, ‘a huge peak, black and huge’ it dominated my mind for days, dark and wonderful, and I salute its author.†Bruce Arnold in Northwords Now Spring 2006
Author
About Iain Mackenzie-Blair
Iain Mackenzie-Blair is a prize-winning poet, published by diehard and regularly in Poetry Scotland and lives ten miles from the nearest shop in the North West Highlands looking across the Minch towards Skye. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin and Balliol, Oxford. A former climbing instructor, columnist for the Irish Times, Near Eastern archaeologist exploring the Dead Sea shore of the Judean Wilderness until the outbreak of the ’67 Arab-Israeli war, he then taught English at one of the great Public Schools where, latterly, he was also a Housemaster.
