THE NATURAL ORDER

by Ursula Bentley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 1982

Despite some thickets of arch chatter, this Anglo-Catholic school chronicle--about three chummy women staffers who swerve into the same extraordinary resolution of their sexual overdrive--is now and again quite funny. Dameris, Carol, and Anne--all from ""embarrassing homes"" of stunningly low aspirations--eventually gather at working-class Manchester's Blessed Ambrose Carstairs Grammar School for Boys, headed by Brother Basil (hairy toes peeping through leather sandals and ""freeze-dried B.O.""). Dameris, teacher of music, is the ""intellectual giant"" of the trio, a heavy cosmic sufferer who ""feels pangs of loss when a leaf falls."" Arme, an office secretary, is a serene being of no particular abilities, but she's a ""genius for love."" And narrator Carol, who is often wracked by ""Gothic passions,"" teaches English through days of martyrdom with hellions of the lower forms, ignoring the increasingly intense regard of fellow-teacher Vernon Dacre, a disciplinarian with a ""scorched classroom policy."" But then all three succumb, more or less, to the relative charisma of Everard Shackleton--an 18-year-old student who takes his intellectual gifts and great beauty for granted. Dameris is the first to fall, tossing good sense and palship to the winds; the crush sends her from thumping silliness to a mysterious Wagnerian tantrum (after she claims she spent the night with a nice quasi-homosexual). Next Carol, who finds unmitigated sexual disaster with Dacre (he makes love to her as if she were ""a thug resisting arrest""), is struck down by Dameris' disease; suddenly ""I was living in Shackleton's school, Shackleton's city, Shackleton's world. . . a kind of flabbergasted joy possessed me. . . ."" And later, after some ecstatic consummations, both Dameris and Carol, all passion spent, recoil from the revelation of Shackleton's other benefactions: in the chaotic aftermath, they'll join now-pregnant Arme in a race to rescue Shackleton from the killer-rage of Anne's former suitor Sammy--with confessions and insults all around. (Anne's baby is to be rased by all of them--but, alas, Shackleton ""had spoiled us for other men."") A bit over-waggish, perhaps, and heavy on the provincial ambience--but still, off and on, keenly amusing.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: FICTION