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The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick review – the kids aren't all right
Alice Chadwick's debut novel takes place during a single day, which begins with the death of geography teacher Mr Ardennes, a calming presence in his unnamed, middle-England grammar school. We meet him briefly at the novel's start – still alive – night-walking as if he could 'never be easy'. After the announcement of the news in assembly, the day marches on unimpeded, with brutal precision. Chadwick's book is not only underpinned by an incisive faithfulness to details – canteen cutlery like 'fish poured from a net', 1980s 'ceiling swirls like crests of royal icing' – but an unwavering adherence to her own time-stamped chapter form. Leaping between the perspectives of students and teachers, it transpires that the children's chief concerns include the forthcoming timetable changes, or the injustice of the deceased teacher no longer marking their projects. Those more deeply troubled are further beyond reach: the enigmatic, enthralling Tin, who 'made the hot, empty days sparkle like broken glass'. Tin has suffered a tragedy of her own, making the event seem like history repeating – but her classmates are convinced her upset pertains to her boyfriend Jonah and best friend Robin, together involved in 'a Sunday night of bonus shock and betrayal'. Graver tensions are also at work. Beneath the day's onslaught of normality, it becomes clear that Mr Ardennes was on one side of a split between a more progressive faction of teachers and a more tyrannical group, spearheaded by Gomme – nicknamed 'the Mad Penguin'. This divide serves to be microcosmic of 1980s society as a whole: workers railing against the authorities. Against a backdrop of Thatcher and the Falklands war, Chadwick's cast of children, on the precipice of adulthood, are caught in the crosshairs of adult politics. Each represents a different class archetype and these are shrewdly – if slightly cruelly – drawn. In the refraction of their various viewpoints, Chadwick is adept at finding the lesser tragedies bursting at the seams, amounting to a clever and compassionate debut. Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick is published by Daunt (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick review
Dark Like Under, Alice Chadwick's ambitious and affecting debut novel, begins and ends at midnight. The 24 hours in between, while at times sunlit and sweltering, hang heavy with the shadow cast by the night before. That shadow is the death of Mr Ardennes. The story is set in England in the 1980s and it begins with Robin and Jonah, two teenagers at the local grammar school, bumping into Mr Ardennes, a well-liked teacher at the school. It is Sunday night – or Monday morning – and they have slipped away from a party. They meet on the banks of the weir, where he is taking one of his regular late night walks, and exchange pleasantries. He appears distracted. 'He looked a bit rough,' observes Jonah. His hands seem oddly heavy in his pockets, 'like weights'. At the next morning's school assembly, his death is announced. The narrative proceeds moment by moment, as if in real time, with each chapter time-stamped and capturing a particular scene throughout the day – assembly, lessons, lunch break, more lessons, the walk home, the pub in the evening, a midnight rendezvous. Each scene inhabits the consciousness of a different character, student or teacher, and explores the ripple effects of this horrendous event as well as the multitude of hopes, fears and desires that make up their inner lives. While the story flits from character to character, the guiding light is Thomasin Carmichael, or Tin. Tin is beautiful and aloof and a source of infatuation for those around her. Robin recalls that the summer they first met she had 'made the hot, empty days sparkle like broken glass'. Robin and Tin are best friends, but since Robin left the party with Jonah, Tin's sometime boyfriend, the two have suffered something of a breach. This provides a secondary emotional weight that hangs over the day. Chadwick is very good at evoking the sensory and emotional overload that comes with adolescence. Everything is too much and freighted with importance: every touch, taste, smell – not to mention who you sit next to in class ('Tin might never sit here again. Robin's eyes blur'). To lie on the grass under a warm sun during break is to be overcome on all fronts: '[Tin] rolls over, warm on the warm ground, her breasts, her pelvis, the fabric of her uniform everywhere touching. Desire, supple and expansive, rises all around, in the wide, dry reach of the earth, each thirsty pore, going unspecific ... Her skin is live with heat, with the sharp pins of the grass. The high sun presses down; water moves deep below, clean and cool with time.' Equally well summoned is the tedium of growing up in a small town in England. 'Often they wandered around, any combination of them, between the pub that let them in, the off-licence that sold them vermouth and the roundabout where they drank it.' There are countless authentically dreary details – the room-temperature sandwich wrapped in clingfilm for lunch, the geography homework on the new retail development around the ring road. There are also, naturally, 80s cultural references galore – the Cure, Hubba Bubba, Flashdance, Sony Walkman – as well as the obligatory nods to Thatcher, Greenham Common and jobcentres. But not much is made of these political references; they feel more like authorial set dressing than the real concerns of the characters. Indeed, it is a frustrating habit of the book to raise intriguing suggestions without following them through. The most important of these is the story behind Mr Ardennes's shocking act, which becomes only less clear as cryptic remarks are made about the rottenness of the school and the culpability of the headmaster, Gomme, an underexplored character. Nevertheless, as an evocation of teenage, and even adult, confusion and inscrutability in a setting that magnifies such emotions, Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic. For the reader, it is a day well spent. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick is published by Daunt (£10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A tale of teenage lust in 1980s Britain, spanning a single day
The best-known contemporary novel to unfold over the course of a single day remains Ian McEwan 's Saturday (2005), about a gifted surgeon with affectionate children, a wife to whom he still makes love, and a covetable house in Fitzrovia. Alice Chadwick's debut, Dark Like Under, also takes place over one day, but its characters are more earthy: a ragtag bunch of teenagers in 1980s England, squaring up to their futures as their clapped-out teachers look nervously on. At the heart of the story is a love triangle between Tin, the novel's charismatic lead, her best friend Robin, and Tin's piercingly handsome on-off boyfriend Jonah. Jonah adores Tin beyond measure, but in the wee hours one night, at a drunken party, he commits the cardinal sin of leaving with Robin – not Tin – in full sight of their friends, then sharing an illicit kiss with her. The strained dynamics between this trio and their circle come under pressure when they must all show up at school the next day. There, they learn that the deputy head, a well-meaning, progressive teacher called Mr Ardennes, has been found dead. To the pupils, he seemed unfathomably ancient, but the teachers know he was middle-aged and (apparently) happily married. Nothing is said about how he died, though a local paper is sniffing around. Tin, in particular, who was a favourite of Mr Ardennes, is devastated: she's already a mother down, and has now lost one of the few adults in her life able to handle her. Chadwick's story flicks regularly – too regularly – between the perspectives of different characters: it's initially hard to keep up with who 's who. What's this teacher's subject again?, I found myself fretting. Which screwed-up teenager are we dealing with here? Still, gradually the cast members fix themselves into place, and some emerge as rather involving, not least Claire, who sits in classes weeping, and Davy, a rugby lad from a farming family who doesn't want to follow his parents into the profession. Unfortunately, gentle-giant Davy turns out to have the hots for Tin, as do most of the characters in this book. In time, everyone's obsession with her becomes wearing. Even the art teacher, who admits she doesn't like her pupils, is drawn to Tin's truculent glamour: she has a 'peculiar dark' about her, Miss Sharpe reflects, 'a dark in the eyes far beyond pigment.' The reader is presumably meant to fall for Tin too, or at least be drawn to her darkness, but I neither did nor was: she treats the people around her with uniform callousness. As the hours tick by, her targets include an asthmatic maths teacher who just wants her to please stick to the school dress code – 'Fuck the rules', she tells him – and a dorky fellow pupil called Nicolas, who plays the viola. 'Why not take up the harpsichord if you want to be unusual?' Tin sneers at this poor soul. 'I'll think about it,' he promises. McEwan filled his 24-hour running time with incident, albeit some of it was slightly ridiculous. Here, Chadwick asks us to monitor minute, and sometimes losable, detail. If a character swings their foot in a particular way, it's logged. Wading through these details – which are rendered in modishly short, blunt sentences – can feel like a slog, and when something actually happens (an outburst, a revelation about a character's past), it feels hard-won. On the other hand, there are moments of real beauty in this book: sentences so well written, so balanced and satisfying, I went back to enjoy them again. At a weir, 'fine green waterweed' is 'combed straight by pulling water'. Jonah, remembering his unwise kiss with Robin, remembers her 'Dr Pepper lips'; when the assembled pupils are told that Mr Ardennes is dead, 'a soft hissing begins. Who can say where exactly it starts? It rises from them as a body, single and continuous.' And, my favourite: as this long, hot, difficult school-day begins, the sky is 'a strong, convincing blue, with fine shreds of gold and pink like a holiday postcard, the white clouds shiny and immaculate'. Leaf Arbuthnot is the author of the novel Looking for Eliza. Dark Like Under is published by Daunt at £10.99. To order your copy for £9.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
