Books & Poetry

Sometimes a book will jog along pleasantly most of the time you are reading it. Ah, you say, this is the book about the doomed high-school teacher who gets fatally close to a selection of her pupils. Or: this is the novel about a bright and precocious girl whose relationship with her father is far too close. Or: this is the novel about how books are no substitute for life. Marisha Pessl’s accomplished, heavily wrought first novel is all of those things, but it is something else as well – something that in due course snaps shut on you like a sharp-toothed trap.

Blue suffers from the delusion that her life is more normal than it is. Her butterfly-collecting mother died in a car crash when she was young, and her father, a political scientist, moves constantly between colleges. When he announces his intention of remaining in one place for Blue’s last year at high school, she welcomes the decision – not so much because it will give her the chance to have normal friendships, but because it will enable her to shine academically.

In the event, she makes friends – with the clique known as the Bluebloods, and with their mentor, film teacher Hannah. We know from the start of the novel that Hannah is doomed, that Blue will find her hanged. Nothing is as it seems; Blue learns the hard way that this is an ugly world in which those who love you may betray you utterly at any moment. Books are safer guides than people.

Each section of this book has the title of a classic novel, and Blue endlessly quotes, often from entirely fictitious books. The game-playing in this – there is also a final exam at the end – is a clever diversion from the fact that Pessl is a mistress of misdirection, who tells us everything we need to know about Blue and her father and persuades us to ignore it. It would be easy to think of this as a predictable and precious comedy of manners; that, however, would be a mistake.