Bill Glose's Blog
February 13, 2022
Confronting the Past
All is not well in the elite halls of Blackburne
Shadow of the LionsShadow of the Lions, by Christopher Swann
For ten years, Christopher Swann worked on a novel never destined to see a bookshelf. It wasn’t just that the plot—involving the Irish Republican Army descending on coastal Georgia—was convoluted but that the whole story seemed unbelievable. After reading one of the later drafts, his wife Kathy asked why he wasn’t writing about something he actually knew something about.
What he knew was boarding school life. As a teen Swann had attended Woodberry Forest in Virginia and for the past two decades he’s been teaching at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta. Starting over, he wrote a new novel set in a fictional, all-boys boarding school named Blackburne where the grounds are called “the Lawn” and freshmen are “third formers.” The elite prep school’s colonial brick buildings and sprawling campus are located in the Shenandoah foothills, the same general region where he’d gone to school.
“I took all the best parts of Woodberry and put them in the book,” Swann says, “and all the bad parts of Blackburne I made up.”
The “bad parts” occur early in Swann’s debut novel, Shadow of the Lions. One student, Matthias Glass, breaks the honor code by cheating and shortly after confessing his transgression to his roommate, the roommate vanishes never to be seen again. Being an angst-ridden teen, Glass can’t help but feel he was the cause of the disappearance, and the guilt of it follows him into adulthood like a long, cold shadow.
Like Swann, Glass becomes an author. Unlike Swann, a lifelong teacher who loves his job, Glass falls into teaching after his literary muse dries up. The story is told from Glass’s point of view, early chapters alternating between his time as a young student and his first year of teaching. Glass had tried ignoring his feelings about his roommate’s disappearance, but when he comes back to school and sees the stone lions that stand at the school’s entrance, the incident rises to the forefront of his thoughts. A body was never discovered nor was any ransom ever asked of the rich family—either of those would have at least provided some closure. When a former classmate reveals a new piece of information—the missing student had lied about where he’d been his last night on campus—Glass decides to dig a little deeper. Enlisting the help of the embittered former deputy who’d been in charge of the case, he discovers that someone had intentionally derailed the investigation. Glass comes to understand there is much more to the story than his own guilt and misguided notions.
For the first two-thirds of the book, the pace is slow and the tone brooding, the story unspooling in bite-sized bits as Glass reconciles the way he remembered things with the way they really were. As Swann writes, “The dew-beaded bricks muffled my footsteps as I walked to Huber Hall the morning of my first day of teaching. The Hill was shrouded in a wet fog from the river that made the walkways and the Lawn glisten in the dawning, pearl-gray light. A fertile odor hung in the air, wet grass and straw and muddy river combining to suggest that the day was not merely beginning but being born.”
But once Glass sees that there is a real mystery at hand, the pace also picks up as surprises spring from hidden corners. Drugs, an old flame resurfacing, confrontations with both law enforcement and gun-toting villains.
Having lived much of the same life as the protagonist, Swann didn’t need to conduct much research to write this novel. But when seedier elements came into it, he sought help to lend veracity to the story. “I’ve a coworker whose husband is a defense lawyer here in Atlanta,” Swann says. “I went to her and said, ‘I need to talk to David about drug laws and about bail.’ The stunned look on her face was priceless. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It’s research for my book.’”
The last third zips along to a thrilling climax then ties up everything by explaining what really happened to the missing student. So much of Glass’s guilt had been baseless worry. And that is a key component to this story—the way we all view other people’s actions and skew them to fit our own slant. Seen through the prism of our personal dramas, it’s easy to forget that other people have their own dilemmas that have nothing at all to do with you.
“I wanted [Shadow of the Lions] to have a sense of mystery and intrigue,” Swann says, “as well as a sense of this past that’s weighing on [Glass], looming over him, following him. The possibility of redemption is there, trying to do something good in the world to atone for something [bad]. …But I also like stories with characters that make mistakes.”
While the young Glass does indeed draw a mistaken conclusion that adversely affected his life, he is able to redeem himself in a second go-around at the same institution. And though it might be unintentional, that too is the story of Swann’s literary life. He’s buried the bones of his IRA-in-Georgia novel—“That book is underneath the bed,” he says, “and it’s going to stay there”—but Shadow of the Lions does everything that first novel couldn’t. This tale of boarding-school life is captivating thanks to the loving way Swann ushers the reader into the lives of this close-knit clan of boys, something he’s lived and now shares with outsiders like a whispered secret that reveals the hidden truth within us all.
Shadow of the LionsShadow of the Lions, by Christopher Swann
For ten years, Christopher Swann worked on a novel never destined to see a bookshelf. It wasn’t just that the plot—involving the Irish Republican Army descending on coastal Georgia—was convoluted but that the whole story seemed unbelievable. After reading one of the later drafts, his wife Kathy asked why he wasn’t writing about something he actually knew something about.
What he knew was boarding school life. As a teen Swann had attended Woodberry Forest in Virginia and for the past two decades he’s been teaching at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta. Starting over, he wrote a new novel set in a fictional, all-boys boarding school named Blackburne where the grounds are called “the Lawn” and freshmen are “third formers.” The elite prep school’s colonial brick buildings and sprawling campus are located in the Shenandoah foothills, the same general region where he’d gone to school.
“I took all the best parts of Woodberry and put them in the book,” Swann says, “and all the bad parts of Blackburne I made up.”
The “bad parts” occur early in Swann’s debut novel, Shadow of the Lions. One student, Matthias Glass, breaks the honor code by cheating and shortly after confessing his transgression to his roommate, the roommate vanishes never to be seen again. Being an angst-ridden teen, Glass can’t help but feel he was the cause of the disappearance, and the guilt of it follows him into adulthood like a long, cold shadow.
Like Swann, Glass becomes an author. Unlike Swann, a lifelong teacher who loves his job, Glass falls into teaching after his literary muse dries up. The story is told from Glass’s point of view, early chapters alternating between his time as a young student and his first year of teaching. Glass had tried ignoring his feelings about his roommate’s disappearance, but when he comes back to school and sees the stone lions that stand at the school’s entrance, the incident rises to the forefront of his thoughts. A body was never discovered nor was any ransom ever asked of the rich family—either of those would have at least provided some closure. When a former classmate reveals a new piece of information—the missing student had lied about where he’d been his last night on campus—Glass decides to dig a little deeper. Enlisting the help of the embittered former deputy who’d been in charge of the case, he discovers that someone had intentionally derailed the investigation. Glass comes to understand there is much more to the story than his own guilt and misguided notions.
For the first two-thirds of the book, the pace is slow and the tone brooding, the story unspooling in bite-sized bits as Glass reconciles the way he remembered things with the way they really were. As Swann writes, “The dew-beaded bricks muffled my footsteps as I walked to Huber Hall the morning of my first day of teaching. The Hill was shrouded in a wet fog from the river that made the walkways and the Lawn glisten in the dawning, pearl-gray light. A fertile odor hung in the air, wet grass and straw and muddy river combining to suggest that the day was not merely beginning but being born.”
But once Glass sees that there is a real mystery at hand, the pace also picks up as surprises spring from hidden corners. Drugs, an old flame resurfacing, confrontations with both law enforcement and gun-toting villains.
Having lived much of the same life as the protagonist, Swann didn’t need to conduct much research to write this novel. But when seedier elements came into it, he sought help to lend veracity to the story. “I’ve a coworker whose husband is a defense lawyer here in Atlanta,” Swann says. “I went to her and said, ‘I need to talk to David about drug laws and about bail.’ The stunned look on her face was priceless. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It’s research for my book.’”
The last third zips along to a thrilling climax then ties up everything by explaining what really happened to the missing student. So much of Glass’s guilt had been baseless worry. And that is a key component to this story—the way we all view other people’s actions and skew them to fit our own slant. Seen through the prism of our personal dramas, it’s easy to forget that other people have their own dilemmas that have nothing at all to do with you.
“I wanted [Shadow of the Lions] to have a sense of mystery and intrigue,” Swann says, “as well as a sense of this past that’s weighing on [Glass], looming over him, following him. The possibility of redemption is there, trying to do something good in the world to atone for something [bad]. …But I also like stories with characters that make mistakes.”
While the young Glass does indeed draw a mistaken conclusion that adversely affected his life, he is able to redeem himself in a second go-around at the same institution. And though it might be unintentional, that too is the story of Swann’s literary life. He’s buried the bones of his IRA-in-Georgia novel—“That book is underneath the bed,” he says, “and it’s going to stay there”—but Shadow of the Lions does everything that first novel couldn’t. This tale of boarding-school life is captivating thanks to the loving way Swann ushers the reader into the lives of this close-knit clan of boys, something he’s lived and now shares with outsiders like a whispered secret that reveals the hidden truth within us all.
