FALL by Colin McAdam
Book Quote:
“Like most private
schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. (…) We
were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were
treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide
by.”
I’d seen Fall
described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good
sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue
are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.
The two main
narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian
high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an
unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking,
not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be
good-natured.
By contrast Noel’s
prose is highly structured – more so than would be possible for the age group.
This is excused by the account being written retrospectively from an adult
standpoint. Within the novel, it’s only Noel that is examined in detail and
whose changes are viewed. Most of the other characters are almost static
emotionally. There’s also a nominal contribution from William, Julius’s
father’s driver.
The “Fall” of the
title is the name of one of the few girls in the predominantly male school, and
is short for “Fallon.” Fall is dating Julius: they’re the ideal couple, both
popular and attractive. Noel is obsessed with Fall as well, though he never
declares it to her, but instead continues to state in the narrative that his
turn with her will come later. The plot (such as it is) revolves around the disappearance
of Fallon from the campus grounds, with both Julius and Noel being questioned
about it.
What the novel is
concerned with is the development of Noel from a weedy sixteen year old who
won’t retaliate if pushed down in a corridor, to a seemingly self-confident,
possibly self-knowing sociopath, prone to explosive violence at rare moments.
When he visits his family in Sydney near the outset of the book, he describes
himself:
“One day I came out
of the pool and saw myself reflected in our sliding door. I was a pale and
skinny sixteen-year-old who had forgotten to put sunblock on one of his
shoulders. My lazy eye was swollen shut, my face was ugly and drained, my
shoulder was livid, and I was still unformed.”
It’s the “unformed”
that McAdam is concerned with. The environment the teenagers are put into is
portrayed as artificial, unhealthy. Despite being highly supervised, there are
effectively no adults in the children’s lives. It’s noticeable that Julius’s
mother is dead (she committed suicide), Fallon’s father is absent (her parents
are divorced) and Noel’s family is supposedly intact but they’re as far away as
they can be, in Australia.
The implication is
that growing up in this unnatural environment, the children inevitably miss out
on vital components of life. Like plants deprived of isolated nutrients,
they’re prone to becoming emotionally stunted – lop-sided, etiolated. In Sydney, as Noel prepares to leave his
parents’ house for school at the end of the holidays, his mother says to him:
“I don’t like
seeing how much you’re changing. … I’m missing all your changes.”
When adults don’t
keep a watch on the changes children go through, undesirable developments
multiply unnoticed. There are key incidents that serve as markers along the
road to Noel’s increasingly antisocial tendencies. The first is an incident in
9th grade, mainly described by Chuck, a close associate of Julius and Noel’s.
The incident involves Noel (still in his “unformed” state) being bullied by a
larger boy, and after a fair period of non-retaliation suddenly turning and
biting his tormentor’s arm. Chuck says it wasn’t even the fact that he
physically bit a piece out of a fellow student’s arm, but that afterwards Noel
was absolutely unaffected by it. “…like it was all normal for him. Like he just
forgot about it.” It’s not the incident itself that the stolid Chuck finds
disturbing, but the separation from a workaday mentality.
Nuances and hints
are brushed in lightly but deliberately. In the corridor of a quiet Friday
afternoon when not many other people are about, Noel passes Mr Staples:
“who taught Algebra
and Functions, nodded at me and said, ‘Mr Reece.’ His lips were tight and there
was a look in his eyes that had developed a few years earlier whenever he saw
me. Distrust or caution or just that squint of a half-formed opinion. I never
liked him.”
Here Noel is
narrating, but he doesn’t refer to the biting incident specifically, but simply
as “a few years earlier.” In the lop-sided world of the semi-abandoned school,
even the teacher’s opinion is possibly “half-formed.”
There’s also an
ambiguous encounter with a girl at the gym in Sydney, where Noel first starts
working out. Meg is a no-nonsense girl and is pointedly stronger than Noel at
the time, but after an encounter at a midnight beach suddenly stops turning up
at the gym. Noel writes her a letter of apology for “frightening” her, but as
far as Noel’s own account relates, there has been nothing to justify this
apology. One is left to wonder what happened after Noel’s pen stopped writing.
This is the case
throughout Noel’s account. How self-aware is he? Although it’s deliberately
left unanswered, the fact that he’s writing after (what is obviously) extensive
discussion and analysis, as well as brief pointers, suggest that Noel is quite
aware of his own nature. When he’s sitting in a café with Fallon, he narrates:
“I’ve often tried
to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her
than it did to me.”
This brings us to
the issue of lack of empathy. Critics of the book have pointed out that
characters are not rounded, they’re cut-outs. Particularly Fall, the prime
object of desire. We’re not at all clear
what she looks like, or anything about her other than she’s a reasonably
attractive, decent girl with a slightly troubled family background. The point
about Fall is, however, not why she is desirable, but that she is. In the
two-dimensional mind of an underdeveloped human with an insufficient intake of
adult stability, the fact that she is desirable is much more important than
what she actually is. As readers, we need know no more. In a world reduced to
symbols and arbitrary black-and-white areas, protagonists are unable to
function when they collide with real life or emotion – the “grey” areas, within
themselves and in the external world.
The premature
separation from parents caused by boarding school is juxtaposed with the
infantilisation of physically mature boys. The school imposes rules, often
ineffectual and seemingly arbitrary. Julius says:
“Chuck’s bed is
here and Ant’s bed is there and I’m wondering why I’m eighteen years old and
sleeping in a bunk bed.”
These two aspects
of the evils inflicted by the school seem to combine to create a small vortex
strong enough to suck susceptible minds into an emotional limbo. McAdam himself
went to a similar boarding school, and there is without doubt a great deal of
catharsis and self-healing within the volume. This does not make it less
worthwhile a read.
Once again, on
hearing the novel was a “literary whodunit” with the title of Fall, I expected
perhaps a detective’s journey into the abyss of a killer’s mind, which drags
the detective into a biblical “Fall” in the process. In the first analysis, one
might be disappointed going in with these expectations. However, in retrospect,
this is precisely what it is – except that the detective is the reader, and
McAdam tries his best to share the “fall” in a manner that will be participated
in, also by the reader. Here, though, the state before the fall is not some
prelapsarian innocence. It’s more mere ignorance, unformedness. The protagonists
lurch from being unformed to being malformed, no pause inbetween. It’s perhaps
more chilling for this, as for all their two-dimensionality, they are in their
own way entirely believable.
