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Lord Dismiss Us
‘It is seldom that I read a new novel which I not only admire but really enjoy. I admire Lord Dismiss Us as a brilliant work of art and I enjoyed it so much that I hated to finish it.’ – Christopher Isherwood
‘Marvellous. I read it very slowly because I was enjoying it so much. I think it achieves a sort of tragic beauty and it is really about love, which all novels profess to be about, but hardly any are.’ – Iris Murdoch
‘This is a fascinatingly extraordinary book which combines the force of Decline and Fall, the Gothic enormities of the Powys brothers, and conveys them with that innate compassion for adolescence that marked Iris Murdoch’s The Bell.’ – Angus Wilson
‘It is difficult in a brief space to do justice to this extraordinary and brilliant novel. It is funny and tragic, extravagant and yet controlled. Its characters leer and grimace and startle like gargoyles, and like gargoyles they have a compelling liveliness.’ – Times Literary Supplement
‘A remarkable evocation of the process of growing up and the ghastly but somehow paradisal closed world of school. I admire particularly the extreme economy of the writing and the way in which the characters are limned chiefly by what they say—the true way of fiction, the dramatic way. The book certainly adds to Mr. Campbell’s stature and is probably the best thing he has ever done. This, of course, means that it is a very good novel indeed.’ – Anthony Burgess
‘[T]he humorous is nicely balanced with the serious. The characters are not mere targets for the author’s wit, but people who might do something unexpected if the author took his eye off them.... What an extraordinary world Mr Campbell has brought to life!’ – Irish Times
‘Simply the best novel by Michael Campbell to date. . . . The terrible claustrophobic atmosphere of private education is caught to the life, or death.’ – Observer
‘[M]oving and fine … the comedy makes the strongest impression … extremely funny and … deeply authentic.’ – New York Times
Mr Crabtree has just arrived to take over as headmaster at Weatherhill, an English public school whose reputation is on the decline, and with the help of his meddlesome wife and odious daughter, he is determined to turn things around. But Crabtree is totally devoid of either sympathy or understanding and his misguided efforts lead to hilarious disasters, such as when he invites a girls’ school for tea to try to woo the boys from their ‘unnatural ways’. Meanwhile, Mrs Crabtree is infatuated with the chaplain, whose sermons about ‘the burning fire’ are a source of constant merriment to the boys, and Dr Kingsly is arranging the annual school play, not thinking of how the homophobic Crabtree will react to seeing the boys dressed as girls. Yet mixed with the comedy are two private Eric Ashley, a brilliant young teacher, is struggling to come to grips with his homosexuality, and Carleton, a senior boy, finds himself strangely drawn to Allen, a fellow member of the cricket team. It all moves inexorably towards a tremendously funny and heartbreakingly sad final day of the school year, when the titular hymn will be sung and more than one character will leave Weatherhill forever. . . .
Widely praised on its initial publication, Lord Dismiss Us (1967) is reprinted here for the first time in three decades. This edition includes a new introduction by Dennis Drabelle, award-winning critic and contributing editor to The Washington Post Book World.
‘Marvellous. I read it very slowly because I was enjoying it so much. I think it achieves a sort of tragic beauty and it is really about love, which all novels profess to be about, but hardly any are.’ – Iris Murdoch
‘This is a fascinatingly extraordinary book which combines the force of Decline and Fall, the Gothic enormities of the Powys brothers, and conveys them with that innate compassion for adolescence that marked Iris Murdoch’s The Bell.’ – Angus Wilson
‘It is difficult in a brief space to do justice to this extraordinary and brilliant novel. It is funny and tragic, extravagant and yet controlled. Its characters leer and grimace and startle like gargoyles, and like gargoyles they have a compelling liveliness.’ – Times Literary Supplement
‘A remarkable evocation of the process of growing up and the ghastly but somehow paradisal closed world of school. I admire particularly the extreme economy of the writing and the way in which the characters are limned chiefly by what they say—the true way of fiction, the dramatic way. The book certainly adds to Mr. Campbell’s stature and is probably the best thing he has ever done. This, of course, means that it is a very good novel indeed.’ – Anthony Burgess
‘[T]he humorous is nicely balanced with the serious. The characters are not mere targets for the author’s wit, but people who might do something unexpected if the author took his eye off them.... What an extraordinary world Mr Campbell has brought to life!’ – Irish Times
‘Simply the best novel by Michael Campbell to date. . . . The terrible claustrophobic atmosphere of private education is caught to the life, or death.’ – Observer
‘[M]oving and fine … the comedy makes the strongest impression … extremely funny and … deeply authentic.’ – New York Times
Mr Crabtree has just arrived to take over as headmaster at Weatherhill, an English public school whose reputation is on the decline, and with the help of his meddlesome wife and odious daughter, he is determined to turn things around. But Crabtree is totally devoid of either sympathy or understanding and his misguided efforts lead to hilarious disasters, such as when he invites a girls’ school for tea to try to woo the boys from their ‘unnatural ways’. Meanwhile, Mrs Crabtree is infatuated with the chaplain, whose sermons about ‘the burning fire’ are a source of constant merriment to the boys, and Dr Kingsly is arranging the annual school play, not thinking of how the homophobic Crabtree will react to seeing the boys dressed as girls. Yet mixed with the comedy are two private Eric Ashley, a brilliant young teacher, is struggling to come to grips with his homosexuality, and Carleton, a senior boy, finds himself strangely drawn to Allen, a fellow member of the cricket team. It all moves inexorably towards a tremendously funny and heartbreakingly sad final day of the school year, when the titular hymn will be sung and more than one character will leave Weatherhill forever. . . .
Widely praised on its initial publication, Lord Dismiss Us (1967) is reprinted here for the first time in three decades. This edition includes a new introduction by Dennis Drabelle, award-winning critic and contributing editor to The Washington Post Book World.
391 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1967
About the author
Michael Campbell
6 books1 followerMichael Campbell was born in Dublin in 1924, the son of Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy, and Beatrice Elvery. He was educated at St. Columba’s College, a boarding school in Dublin – which later served as the model for Weatherhill in Lord Dismiss Us (1967) – and Trinity College, Dublin. He was called to the Bar by King’s Inns, Dublin in 1947, but quickly turned from the law to journalism, working as an Irish Times correspondent in London for several years. Campbell’s first novel, Peter Perry, was published in 1956 but was withdrawn after the threat of a libel action. His other comic novels, including Oh Mary, This London (1959), The Princess in London (1964), and Nothing Doing (1970), were well received, but Campbell is chiefly remembered for Lord Dismiss Us, which was widely praised by critics in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and is regarded as perhaps the finest novel ever written about English public school life.
Campbell and his partner, William Holden, a publicity director for the publishing firm of William Heinemann, lived for many years in Oxfordshire, where they were friends and neighbours with the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley; Murdoch was particularly effusive in her praise of Lord Dismiss Us.
When Campbell’s older brother, the humorist and television personality Patrick Campbell, died in 1980, Michael Campbell succeeded to the title of 4th Baron Glenavy. He died in 1984.
Campbell and his partner, William Holden, a publicity director for the publishing firm of William Heinemann, lived for many years in Oxfordshire, where they were friends and neighbours with the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley; Murdoch was particularly effusive in her praise of Lord Dismiss Us.
When Campbell’s older brother, the humorist and television personality Patrick Campbell, died in 1980, Michael Campbell succeeded to the title of 4th Baron Glenavy. He died in 1984.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 27, 2024
To understand this novel I think it is important to understand how the novel was presented on publication in 1967. Furthermore I apologise to any reader who doesn't understand the specific English meaning of terms like preparatory or public school, prefects and masters. I am not going to explain the English terminology but only state that within the UK preparatory and public schools, particularly and the way they are/were run had meanings completely alien to the experience of anyone who didn't attend one.
'The setting is an English public school and the time is the summer term...Weatherill...is one of those minor public schools where much is left to be desired in the choice of staff and organisation and desire takes many forms...the masters as varied a bunch as one could meet-a crusty and obsessive misogynist, an almost professional extrovert and Eric Ashley...As if in some vast circular aquarium, the inhabitants of the school move around within their boundaries...darting and flashing through the shoals, revealing light and beauty and sometimes danger...(which) lies in the attraction and attractiveness, the jealousy and intrigues and the growth of love both sacred and profane in this microcosm of society...' edited highlights from the jacket flyleaf of the 1967 hardback edition of the novel (further quotes regarding the author can be found at the end of the review).
I was tempted to say a great deal about the historical context of this novel and 'public school novels' and the history of/and meaning of 'Public Schools' in the UK but I abandoned that because this is a review, not a literary exegesis or historical commentary. 'Lord Dismiss Us' is back in print thanks to Valencourt Books and I have no wish to discourage their sales or anyone from reading this delightful, and extremely good novel. But I must insist 'Lord Dismiss Us' is not a 'gay' novel as even I understood the term back in my youth (the 1970s and 1980s). It is a novel about homosexuality and homosexuals and about falling in love for the first time (and I will have much praise for 'Lord Dismiss Us' as novel of first love) but within the context of UK public school/boarding school life.
If you read this novel as a 'coming out' novel you will be disappointed because it doesn't follow any of the plot tropes of 'coming out' novels. It is not a 'homosexual' novel in the sense such novels were written at the time this novel was published (1967). It is not looking at 'homosexuality' it is looking at 'homosexuality' within boys boarding schools because by 1967 no one could pretend that it wasn't endemic. Which is why one of the subplots of the novel involves the new headmaster having senior students from a local girls boarding school brought in to play tennis with senior boys in the hopes of directing the boys sexual interests away from other boys (please see my footnote *1 below)
There are 'homosexuals' in the novel, one even kills himself at the novel's end but the reasons are not only because he is homosexual (I really can't refer to anyone in the novel as gay because they aren't as it would be understood in a few years time), indeed whether Carleton, who is at the centre of the novel, is homosexual is left open. He happily indulges in mutual masturbation with one boy and spends most of the novel in love with another boy, Nicky Allen, who he kisses and fondles (heavy petting as it would be described by straight couples) but does not have sex of any sort with Nicky Allen (I will provide my reading of Carleton in a moment).
What 'Lord Dismiss Us' recounts is the blossoming of first love between Carleton and Allen (readers may get confused because surnames, rather than first names, are used, almost, exclusively) and I do not know of a novel which describes adolescent first love with a similar honesty. Here is an excerpt when Carleton travels back together from an away match squashed with other players into a car with Allen on his knees and Carleton hardly knows what he feels and has no idea what Allen might feel:
"...There was a face at the door. 'Come on' he (Carleton) said. Allen sat on his knees. Oh gosh...as they drove away, waving and cheering. On the very points of his knees. Everyone was shouting and laughing, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. Not even Allen who was joining in. Did he know? Did he know that if he moved it would be unbearable? Impossible to tell...And this was ecstasy enough. Such absolute unimagined joy. He was afraid to raise his hands to hold him. No, he had laid his right hand gently on Allen's soft blue blazer. On his waist. Oh heavens...has he felt my hand, does he know? The black hair came out in a wave from under the back of his blue cap. His neck was brown. His beautiful shoulder blades moved inside his blazer...He had a faint, sweet smell...May these moments of bliss go on and on for ever (sic)." (page 125)
and later:
"He could not help it: he had raised his other hand, and put his arm around Allen and brought him gently closer. His hand was on that wonderful shoulder-blade. Allen's dark, sweet smelling hair was against his cheek. It was ecstasy. His legs were trembling. Allen was his. This marvellous boy was his." (page 157)
Least you imagine I have curtailed my quotation just before things get interesting the next sentence announces a door banging and footsteps as a prelude to Carleton and Allen going their separate ways. Because the point of all that boy-on-boy activity at these boarding schools was not sex, though I don't deny there was sex (see my footnote *2 below) but falling in love for the first time. It is probably hard for those under fifty or sixty to grasp just how isolated boys were in these schools. Who else were they to fall in love with except each other? 'Lord Dismiss Us' is above all a wonderful evocation of first love. But it is also a clear eyed examination of how the entire all-male monastic ethos of these schools, combined with the larger societal condemnation of homosexual behaviour caused confusion, distorted and condemned the ignorant (how naively ignorant people were back then is hard to fathom) young as they tried to cope with and understand the most ordinary aspects of growing up. That ethos destroyed some and crippled others and not just for 'unnatural desires' one of the most interesting subplots of the novel is the fate of heterosexual love in that atmosphere.
How times change is reflected in one of the most appalling incidents in the novel where the headmaster and teaching staff conspire to encourage the sixth form boys to physically assault two former boys who crept back into the school to play a practical joke. It couldn't happen now, lawsuits and criminal charges would ruin both the school and its staff.
I love the novel; it is as good if not better than it was on first reading fifty years ago. If you really want to understand the novel then seek out the hymn from which the title is taken.
Finally I can't help concluding my review with the smug observation that while the English colonised Ireland (any many other places) and used their language to subvert, suborn and destroy an independent Irish identity and language, the Irish, and many other colonised people, took both the colonisers language and subject matter and surpassed their conquerors and oppressors. As an example I would point to Oscar Wilde and Richard Brinsley Sheridan whose comedies of English social class and manners are definitive. More ironically it is Michael Campbell and William Trevor, two Irish authors, who have written the finest examples of that quintessentially English genre the boarding school story (see my footnote *3 below).
*1 It is both amusing, and horrifying, to read in books such as 'The Public School' by Jonathan Garthorn-Hardy how the introduction of girls into previously all boys boarding schools was discussed and plotted purely as way to keep the older boys from eyeing up the younger ones. Everything is about the good of the boys. No thought or consideration was given to the girls. It is so misogynistic that it almost defies description.
*2 I am not saying there was no sex at boys schools only that mutual masturbation, not any type coitus, was the norm. It was probably to disperse its unmistakable perfume that ensured from such activity that the schools were invariably designed to be drafty. Despite their size it was, and probably still is, extremely difficult for two students to be alone for the time it takes to get sufficiently undressed to do more than wank each other off. Remember it was not getting out of clothes but getting back into them, very quickly, that was important.
*3 Adding to, for me, this delicious irony is that neither Trevor (born 1924) nor Campbell (born 1948) attended an English boarding school they both attended an Irish doppelganger, St Columba's, in Dublin. William Trevor wrote about English public schools in the novel 'The Old Boys' and many short stories, most brilliantly 'Torridge'. After reading 'Lord Dismiss Us' I reread 'Torridge' and it is obvious that both authors based their stories on their experiences at St. Columba's. Although this was known about Lord Dismiss Us I believe I am the first to identify the connection in terms of Torridge. In 'Lord Dismiss Us' and 'Torridge' the school chaplains, the Rev Cyril Starr with his 'starlings' and God Harvey (we are never told his real name) and his 'linnets', respectively, are so similar that I cannot believe they are not based on the same original.
'The setting is an English public school and the time is the summer term...Weatherill...is one of those minor public schools where much is left to be desired in the choice of staff and organisation and desire takes many forms...the masters as varied a bunch as one could meet-a crusty and obsessive misogynist, an almost professional extrovert and Eric Ashley...As if in some vast circular aquarium, the inhabitants of the school move around within their boundaries...darting and flashing through the shoals, revealing light and beauty and sometimes danger...(which) lies in the attraction and attractiveness, the jealousy and intrigues and the growth of love both sacred and profane in this microcosm of society...' edited highlights from the jacket flyleaf of the 1967 hardback edition of the novel (further quotes regarding the author can be found at the end of the review).
I was tempted to say a great deal about the historical context of this novel and 'public school novels' and the history of/and meaning of 'Public Schools' in the UK but I abandoned that because this is a review, not a literary exegesis or historical commentary. 'Lord Dismiss Us' is back in print thanks to Valencourt Books and I have no wish to discourage their sales or anyone from reading this delightful, and extremely good novel. But I must insist 'Lord Dismiss Us' is not a 'gay' novel as even I understood the term back in my youth (the 1970s and 1980s). It is a novel about homosexuality and homosexuals and about falling in love for the first time (and I will have much praise for 'Lord Dismiss Us' as novel of first love) but within the context of UK public school/boarding school life.
If you read this novel as a 'coming out' novel you will be disappointed because it doesn't follow any of the plot tropes of 'coming out' novels. It is not a 'homosexual' novel in the sense such novels were written at the time this novel was published (1967). It is not looking at 'homosexuality' it is looking at 'homosexuality' within boys boarding schools because by 1967 no one could pretend that it wasn't endemic. Which is why one of the subplots of the novel involves the new headmaster having senior students from a local girls boarding school brought in to play tennis with senior boys in the hopes of directing the boys sexual interests away from other boys (please see my footnote *1 below)
There are 'homosexuals' in the novel, one even kills himself at the novel's end but the reasons are not only because he is homosexual (I really can't refer to anyone in the novel as gay because they aren't as it would be understood in a few years time), indeed whether Carleton, who is at the centre of the novel, is homosexual is left open. He happily indulges in mutual masturbation with one boy and spends most of the novel in love with another boy, Nicky Allen, who he kisses and fondles (heavy petting as it would be described by straight couples) but does not have sex of any sort with Nicky Allen (I will provide my reading of Carleton in a moment).
What 'Lord Dismiss Us' recounts is the blossoming of first love between Carleton and Allen (readers may get confused because surnames, rather than first names, are used, almost, exclusively) and I do not know of a novel which describes adolescent first love with a similar honesty. Here is an excerpt when Carleton travels back together from an away match squashed with other players into a car with Allen on his knees and Carleton hardly knows what he feels and has no idea what Allen might feel:
"...There was a face at the door. 'Come on' he (Carleton) said. Allen sat on his knees. Oh gosh...as they drove away, waving and cheering. On the very points of his knees. Everyone was shouting and laughing, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. Not even Allen who was joining in. Did he know? Did he know that if he moved it would be unbearable? Impossible to tell...And this was ecstasy enough. Such absolute unimagined joy. He was afraid to raise his hands to hold him. No, he had laid his right hand gently on Allen's soft blue blazer. On his waist. Oh heavens...has he felt my hand, does he know? The black hair came out in a wave from under the back of his blue cap. His neck was brown. His beautiful shoulder blades moved inside his blazer...He had a faint, sweet smell...May these moments of bliss go on and on for ever (sic)." (page 125)
and later:
"He could not help it: he had raised his other hand, and put his arm around Allen and brought him gently closer. His hand was on that wonderful shoulder-blade. Allen's dark, sweet smelling hair was against his cheek. It was ecstasy. His legs were trembling. Allen was his. This marvellous boy was his." (page 157)
Least you imagine I have curtailed my quotation just before things get interesting the next sentence announces a door banging and footsteps as a prelude to Carleton and Allen going their separate ways. Because the point of all that boy-on-boy activity at these boarding schools was not sex, though I don't deny there was sex (see my footnote *2 below) but falling in love for the first time. It is probably hard for those under fifty or sixty to grasp just how isolated boys were in these schools. Who else were they to fall in love with except each other? 'Lord Dismiss Us' is above all a wonderful evocation of first love. But it is also a clear eyed examination of how the entire all-male monastic ethos of these schools, combined with the larger societal condemnation of homosexual behaviour caused confusion, distorted and condemned the ignorant (how naively ignorant people were back then is hard to fathom) young as they tried to cope with and understand the most ordinary aspects of growing up. That ethos destroyed some and crippled others and not just for 'unnatural desires' one of the most interesting subplots of the novel is the fate of heterosexual love in that atmosphere.
How times change is reflected in one of the most appalling incidents in the novel where the headmaster and teaching staff conspire to encourage the sixth form boys to physically assault two former boys who crept back into the school to play a practical joke. It couldn't happen now, lawsuits and criminal charges would ruin both the school and its staff.
I love the novel; it is as good if not better than it was on first reading fifty years ago. If you really want to understand the novel then seek out the hymn from which the title is taken.
Finally I can't help concluding my review with the smug observation that while the English colonised Ireland (any many other places) and used their language to subvert, suborn and destroy an independent Irish identity and language, the Irish, and many other colonised people, took both the colonisers language and subject matter and surpassed their conquerors and oppressors. As an example I would point to Oscar Wilde and Richard Brinsley Sheridan whose comedies of English social class and manners are definitive. More ironically it is Michael Campbell and William Trevor, two Irish authors, who have written the finest examples of that quintessentially English genre the boarding school story (see my footnote *3 below).
*1 It is both amusing, and horrifying, to read in books such as 'The Public School' by Jonathan Garthorn-Hardy how the introduction of girls into previously all boys boarding schools was discussed and plotted purely as way to keep the older boys from eyeing up the younger ones. Everything is about the good of the boys. No thought or consideration was given to the girls. It is so misogynistic that it almost defies description.
*2 I am not saying there was no sex at boys schools only that mutual masturbation, not any type coitus, was the norm. It was probably to disperse its unmistakable perfume that ensured from such activity that the schools were invariably designed to be drafty. Despite their size it was, and probably still is, extremely difficult for two students to be alone for the time it takes to get sufficiently undressed to do more than wank each other off. Remember it was not getting out of clothes but getting back into them, very quickly, that was important.
*3 Adding to, for me, this delicious irony is that neither Trevor (born 1924) nor Campbell (born 1948) attended an English boarding school they both attended an Irish doppelganger, St Columba's, in Dublin. William Trevor wrote about English public schools in the novel 'The Old Boys' and many short stories, most brilliantly 'Torridge'. After reading 'Lord Dismiss Us' I reread 'Torridge' and it is obvious that both authors based their stories on their experiences at St. Columba's. Although this was known about Lord Dismiss Us I believe I am the first to identify the connection in terms of Torridge. In 'Lord Dismiss Us' and 'Torridge' the school chaplains, the Rev Cyril Starr with his 'starlings' and God Harvey (we are never told his real name) and his 'linnets', respectively, are so similar that I cannot believe they are not based on the same original.
September 25, 2011
I know the book cannot be classed as "great literature" but it is so funny and so charming and so far beyond, it seems to me, what anyone is capable of writing in the same genre today (perhaps I am just being a curmugeon and getting old-I am very willing to be corrected on that) that I have to recommend it. It would seem to be the writer's experiences of many years in a school packed with wild improbability into a term. What a term! The book is action packed from beginning to end, is utterly and charmingly readable and a monument to the sexual eccentiricity of coming of age in an all male public school.
The steamy hothouse world is graphically portrayed and the the tearful end when we are all scattered into the big wide world, dismissed we hope, with a blessing rather than a curse. Some of us, as I think Cyril Connoly noted, are never able to fulfil the promise of those days and become in some respects a shell, hollowed out by the intensity of our experiences in that short time of our boarding school days.
Apart from the obvious, "Lord dismiss us" shares with "Sandel" the characteristic of being the one-off stroke of genius of its author, who never wrote anything significant, to my knowledge, before this novel or after it.
The steamy hothouse world is graphically portrayed and the the tearful end when we are all scattered into the big wide world, dismissed we hope, with a blessing rather than a curse. Some of us, as I think Cyril Connoly noted, are never able to fulfil the promise of those days and become in some respects a shell, hollowed out by the intensity of our experiences in that short time of our boarding school days.
Apart from the obvious, "Lord dismiss us" shares with "Sandel" the characteristic of being the one-off stroke of genius of its author, who never wrote anything significant, to my knowledge, before this novel or after it.
Did Not Finish
June 19, 2021I've tried on three separate occasions to listen to this audiobook. On the third try after getting slightly more than half way through it, I finally decided I'd had enough. It just goes on and on and on - and nothing ever happens. Worse, none of the characters is memorable or particularly interesting.
April 28, 2015
A very curious bird this novel, as one of its colourful characters might say. A Boys' School story written in 1967, the year homosexuality became legal in the UK, it represents the tradition of the classic gay novel in which to love another man is nothing but misery, ruin and death, mind unbalanced by the body’s needs. Yet within that there is the promise that reflects decriminalisation and Swinging 60s sexual freedom.
I love Boys' School stories, all that adolescent passion and rampaging hormones, youthful beauty and lithe limbs; but this is a pretty depressing book…you know early on it’s just not going to end well. Like Forster’s Maurice it is frustrating and difficult to understand WHY it all had to go wrong, how an intelligent character should want to stay trapped in a situation he could so easily get out of if only he could accept there is nothing shameful in who he is. That of course is the point, the mindset of another era that reminds us just how much things have changed.
The novel appears to lay blame for homosexuality and accompanying angst on the public school system. Put small boys into an exclusively male environment deprived of family (especially maternal) affection and they will turn to each other for comfort. It deals with a small closed community where homosexuality is institutionalised until the arrival of a new headmaster determined to make his mark by stamping out such ‘unchristian practices’.
It rightly indicts a system that left boys/men emotionally stunted, damaged for life, imbued with a detachment made dangerous by violent outbursts of cruelty inculcated by a harsh discipline that allowed grown men to beat boys as punishment for petty misdemeanors, and older boys in turn to dish out the same to those lower down the pecking order. Some might baulk at the way child abuse appears to be condoned if the adult’s motives are well intentioned and centred on the boy rather than personal pleasure.
The novel has a large cast of oddbods and eccentrics and actually is surprisingly humorous. It’s not easy to find but worth looking out for if you are interested in the complications of human relationships and sexual attraction in the hothouse atmosphere of a boarding school. It should be read as history. I doubt it would be published today, certainly not as a mass-market paperback
I love Boys' School stories, all that adolescent passion and rampaging hormones, youthful beauty and lithe limbs; but this is a pretty depressing book…you know early on it’s just not going to end well. Like Forster’s Maurice it is frustrating and difficult to understand WHY it all had to go wrong, how an intelligent character should want to stay trapped in a situation he could so easily get out of if only he could accept there is nothing shameful in who he is. That of course is the point, the mindset of another era that reminds us just how much things have changed.
The novel appears to lay blame for homosexuality and accompanying angst on the public school system. Put small boys into an exclusively male environment deprived of family (especially maternal) affection and they will turn to each other for comfort. It deals with a small closed community where homosexuality is institutionalised until the arrival of a new headmaster determined to make his mark by stamping out such ‘unchristian practices’.
It rightly indicts a system that left boys/men emotionally stunted, damaged for life, imbued with a detachment made dangerous by violent outbursts of cruelty inculcated by a harsh discipline that allowed grown men to beat boys as punishment for petty misdemeanors, and older boys in turn to dish out the same to those lower down the pecking order. Some might baulk at the way child abuse appears to be condoned if the adult’s motives are well intentioned and centred on the boy rather than personal pleasure.
The novel has a large cast of oddbods and eccentrics and actually is surprisingly humorous. It’s not easy to find but worth looking out for if you are interested in the complications of human relationships and sexual attraction in the hothouse atmosphere of a boarding school. It should be read as history. I doubt it would be published today, certainly not as a mass-market paperback
August 19, 2012
In the blurb at the back, Iris Murdoch writes: I read it very slowly because I was enjoying it so much. I think it achieves a sort of tragic beauty...." Well, I read more quickly, but I think it is indeed beautiful. It captures the passion not only of youth and love, but also of what we feel, what most of us feel, for the School that seemed the world to us when we were there. The cricket terminology (and perhaps lots of other Brit terms) escaped me, but the feelings of the masters and the boys brought me to tears with remembered joy and pain. You may see Rogers Scudder in that frustrated realist Dr. Rowles, but you will feel all the anger you ever felt against any misguided Head (although this one is truly evil), watching him (or her, F O'C, wherever you are) try to control human beings as if they were yours to control.
January 10, 2015
Oh, my, my. This is easily the best of the British/Irish boarding school novels I've read. The novel is outrageously funny at times, but mostly it's just a very powerful love story that made me ache, wishing I had that, and then made me ache because... well, that would be a spoiler. Just a beautifully-written, beatifully-conceived story with lovable characters, humor, and most of all, love. I've read it three times.
March 23, 2011
I read this as a boy, immediately after hearing it in a BBC radio adaptation.
I was just beginning to understand what 'homosexual' meant. The story had a powerful effect on me, because of my innocence and curiosity (and fear). One never forgets books that lighten the darkness of one's childhood ignorance.
I was just beginning to understand what 'homosexual' meant. The story had a powerful effect on me, because of my innocence and curiosity (and fear). One never forgets books that lighten the darkness of one's childhood ignorance.
February 11, 2018
Extraordinary in many ways. Poignant, funny, bitter-sweet, exhilarating, with an unforgettable cast of characters. Astonishingly insightful in its treatment of same-sex desire - both young love and age-differentiated attraction - whether in its physical, platonic or sublimated manifestations. The sort of book one wishes one had written.
May 19, 2025
‘It is really about love, which all novels profess to be about, but hardly any are,’ said Iris Murdoch on her back-cover blurb; flattering praise from a writer of her stature. I agree, but would also say that the book is about lots of other things as well – so much is going on simultaneously – which makes it so tremendous. An ambitious new headmaster and his wife arrive at a public school of declining reputation and are aghast at what they hear of the romantic attachments of some of the boys. The duo embark on a clean-up campaign, which is both comic and disastrous: they are insensitive puritans, incompetent and unimaginative. The school is an emotional hothouse – for the most part, the outside world is irrelevant, barely more than a rumour – but there is no-one to help the boys with their emotions. Carleton, a senior prefect, in love with a boy two years his junior, asks himself:
What really has happened? How wrong was it, how final? Who in the world was there to ask? What about mothers and fathers? Weren’t they supposed to help sometimes? But they were a thousand miles away. For eight years of his young life he had been put out on his own, to decide everything for himself.
The adults are mostly in retreat from the emotions: the chill I felt when I read that several of the teachers, including the tortured figure of Eric Ashley, were Old Boys! What could be more psychologically ruinous for someone deeply wounded by his own boyhood romance than returning to nurse it in the place which first defeated him? It is noticeable that the healthiest adults emotionally, the games master and matron, who are engaged to be married, and might thereby be thought to set a good example to wayward boys, are forced out by the envy and stupidity of the new regime.
Ashley’s mother visits one day, and unhappy at his obvious unhappiness, urges him to throw up his job:
‘I don’t really understand any of it. I never did. We mothers are kept out. The sons say nothing. The fathers are silent. Should we really send him to a public school? What’s it like there? What was yours like? They evade it always. There’s some conspiracy.’
At the close of the novel, Carleton’s father, who has adopted the stance of seeing, knowing and remembering nothing, remarks complacently, as he drives his son away for the final time, ‘What does it feel like, knowing that the basis of your life has been formed?… You’ll discover it will all stand you in good stead… Our boarding-school system is still the best in the world.’ I recall, years ago, seeing a 40 Minutes documentary in which a middle-aged man talked about a boy he’d known who was so devastated at being left at his prep school at the age of seven that he’d clung to the door of his parents’ car, crying and screaming, and had had to be peeled away from it. ‘How did he get on afterwards?’ said the off-camera interviewer. ‘Oh, fine,’ said the man blandly.
What really has happened? How wrong was it, how final? Who in the world was there to ask? What about mothers and fathers? Weren’t they supposed to help sometimes? But they were a thousand miles away. For eight years of his young life he had been put out on his own, to decide everything for himself.
The adults are mostly in retreat from the emotions: the chill I felt when I read that several of the teachers, including the tortured figure of Eric Ashley, were Old Boys! What could be more psychologically ruinous for someone deeply wounded by his own boyhood romance than returning to nurse it in the place which first defeated him? It is noticeable that the healthiest adults emotionally, the games master and matron, who are engaged to be married, and might thereby be thought to set a good example to wayward boys, are forced out by the envy and stupidity of the new regime.
Ashley’s mother visits one day, and unhappy at his obvious unhappiness, urges him to throw up his job:
‘I don’t really understand any of it. I never did. We mothers are kept out. The sons say nothing. The fathers are silent. Should we really send him to a public school? What’s it like there? What was yours like? They evade it always. There’s some conspiracy.’
At the close of the novel, Carleton’s father, who has adopted the stance of seeing, knowing and remembering nothing, remarks complacently, as he drives his son away for the final time, ‘What does it feel like, knowing that the basis of your life has been formed?… You’ll discover it will all stand you in good stead… Our boarding-school system is still the best in the world.’ I recall, years ago, seeing a 40 Minutes documentary in which a middle-aged man talked about a boy he’d known who was so devastated at being left at his prep school at the age of seven that he’d clung to the door of his parents’ car, crying and screaming, and had had to be peeled away from it. ‘How did he get on afterwards?’ said the off-camera interviewer. ‘Oh, fine,’ said the man blandly.
April 13, 2012
This reminded me a lot of The Charioteer, in terms of prose style. It was very dense, and went back and forth between people's heads. Sometimes it read like something that had been translated from another language, with the way things seemed out of context sometimes. I think it's just the difference between 1960s dialogue and writing and nowadays, because all the books I've read written around this period share that peculiar characteristic.
I felt a little confused about just what the book was trying to tell me, in terms of homosexuality as something apart from the kind of romances that happened as a matter of course between boys in public schools. But I wonder how much of that was the time period - I wonder what the book would have been like if it had been written now.
All that aside, this was a very poignantly written record of that insulated world of the boy's school and that period between boy and adult. It had some very beautiful and insightful passages.
February 5, 2022
"Farce is only tragedy seen in a particular way," says one of the characters in this novel, which more or less describes the feeling it leaves you with. There are a lot of very funny episodes, as well as a genuinely charming and intense romance, but it all has a tragic dimension that becomes more pronounced as the end approaches.
I see a few reviews saying this is not "great literature" (while still praising it). It really depends what you mean by "great." It would be unfair to compare Michael Campbell to, say, Jane Austen. But this is an immensely entertaining book, painting a very vivid and seemingly authentic picture of the alien, but fascinating world of the English public school. I'm surprised that Lord Dismiss Us is not better known.
I see a few reviews saying this is not "great literature" (while still praising it). It really depends what you mean by "great." It would be unfair to compare Michael Campbell to, say, Jane Austen. But this is an immensely entertaining book, painting a very vivid and seemingly authentic picture of the alien, but fascinating world of the English public school. I'm surprised that Lord Dismiss Us is not better known.
August 3, 2018
It probably doesn’t qualify as great literature, but it is in its own way a masterpiece. As someone with scholaraly pretentious when it comes to the boarding-school genre, I was amazed by how well it summarised and addressed problems that had been appearing for over a century, much as it does for gay pulp literature. It’s a compelling read that is tinged with tragedy, and the potential ‘trashiness’ of the plot is undermined by the skilled characterisation, wit and erudite quotation battles (all of these embodied by the wonderful teacher Eric Ashley). All in all, it’s a poignant reflection of the hypocrisy of the English boarding school system. I love it.
February 12, 2019
This book is long but having said that I came back again and again transported to the world of english boarding schools. The different variety of characters come to life which makes for funny and endearing moments. The way each character navigates their life in world set by structure and rigid codes is touching and emotional. A beautiful book and tragedy at the same time really enjoyed it!
October 23, 2012
amazing
March 1, 2015
A boys boarding school always seems like a nightmarish experience to me but this book is so detailed about the experience and the characters so seemingly to life, that it's a great novel to read.
August 22, 2026
What a phenomenal book. How is this so overlooked? I DEVOURED this in two days, and frankly I would’ve had it finished in one if it wasn’t for that annoying thing we all require called sleep. Lord Dismiss Us is a shockingly candid depiction of public school life, and the homosexuality rife in these institutions. Yet at its core is a beautiful tale of first love, and all the euphoria and complications that come with it.
Michael Campbell creates such a compelling and authentic world here that whilst reading it I was sure it was based on his own experiences. Indeed I was right, as I discovered afterwards that almost all of the characters and lots of the scenarios were lifted from his time at St Columba’s. Campbell succeeds in painting a very funny picture of public school life. The eccentricity of the masters and the bantering and bickering between the students comes through the pages so vividly. I was reminded at times of the acerbic comedy of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. However, whilst Waugh’s book focuses predominantly on the teachers, in Lord Dismiss Us we spend more time with the boys attending the school.
It’s fascinating to imagine the world of public schools in this era (and earlier - since Campbell was inspired by his time at school during WWII). With an all-male population going through puberty, and no women in sight, it’s hardly surprising that these schools were hotbeds for romantic and sexual liaisons. Yet that’s not to say these relationships were devoid of love, as Michael Campbell strives to show here.
Spoilers below!
The central love affair between Carleton and Allen has all the hallmarks of young love. It’s utterly heartwarming. But what gives the book real depth is the way Carleton is mirrored against his teacher Eric Ashley. It is revealed that Ashley attended the school 6 years ago and also engaged in a similarly thrilling romance that continues to haunt him. Full of self-loathing at the loss of this love, as well as his inability to accept his sexuality, he is headed on a path that will ultimately spell his doom. During a later scene in the book, Ashley, who is aware of Carleton’s affair, shouts at him: “This is what will happen to you!”
It’s this theme that swirls around the book. How can these gay relationships possibly be wrong when they bring the boys so much happiness? Carleton’s unbridled joy is in direct opposition to the whirlwind of shame the Headmaster imposes on the boys caught and expelled for engaging in these homosexual affairs. This witch hunt is something that drives a big portion of the book and it’s touching during these moments to see the solidarity between (most of) the pupils.
This idea of shame really comes into play in the last part of the book, where Carleton reckons with the sexual feelings he feels for Allen, who he has spurned as a result. In the Chapel he lets the emotion of the music swell over him and muses:
“They had smiled often, with this kind of happiness. They had smiled on the pillow. And then. . . .
A complete surprise, and shock. That was all.
How simple. Just love.
Again, all was resolved: serenely this time. Not so thunderously. The world and life were to be properly enjoyed. It was all there. It was up to oneself. This was what it sounded like when you achieved it. Serenity after. . . .” (the missing word at the end of that quote being “passion” - a line from a poem referenced earlier on).
It’s enormously refreshing that Carleton comes to this conclusion. Characters heavy with guilt and shame are common in gay literature but Lord Dismiss Us stresses that it doesn’t have to be that way. Though his attempts to patch things up with Allen are unsuccessful, the book thankfully doesn’t end on a sad note. The short story Carleton has written is to be published! He has a future.
By the very end, Carleton can no longer be compared to Ashley. Their trajectories are not the same. He isn’t tormented by his lost love. He’s well-adjusted and happy and unafraid of his sexuality. You leave the book incredibly hopeful for him. How nice it would’ve been to have a sequel of him at Oxford! I really grew to love his character and the journey he went on. Alas!
Michael Campbell creates such a compelling and authentic world here that whilst reading it I was sure it was based on his own experiences. Indeed I was right, as I discovered afterwards that almost all of the characters and lots of the scenarios were lifted from his time at St Columba’s. Campbell succeeds in painting a very funny picture of public school life. The eccentricity of the masters and the bantering and bickering between the students comes through the pages so vividly. I was reminded at times of the acerbic comedy of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. However, whilst Waugh’s book focuses predominantly on the teachers, in Lord Dismiss Us we spend more time with the boys attending the school.
It’s fascinating to imagine the world of public schools in this era (and earlier - since Campbell was inspired by his time at school during WWII). With an all-male population going through puberty, and no women in sight, it’s hardly surprising that these schools were hotbeds for romantic and sexual liaisons. Yet that’s not to say these relationships were devoid of love, as Michael Campbell strives to show here.
Spoilers below!
The central love affair between Carleton and Allen has all the hallmarks of young love. It’s utterly heartwarming. But what gives the book real depth is the way Carleton is mirrored against his teacher Eric Ashley. It is revealed that Ashley attended the school 6 years ago and also engaged in a similarly thrilling romance that continues to haunt him. Full of self-loathing at the loss of this love, as well as his inability to accept his sexuality, he is headed on a path that will ultimately spell his doom. During a later scene in the book, Ashley, who is aware of Carleton’s affair, shouts at him: “This is what will happen to you!”
It’s this theme that swirls around the book. How can these gay relationships possibly be wrong when they bring the boys so much happiness? Carleton’s unbridled joy is in direct opposition to the whirlwind of shame the Headmaster imposes on the boys caught and expelled for engaging in these homosexual affairs. This witch hunt is something that drives a big portion of the book and it’s touching during these moments to see the solidarity between (most of) the pupils.
This idea of shame really comes into play in the last part of the book, where Carleton reckons with the sexual feelings he feels for Allen, who he has spurned as a result. In the Chapel he lets the emotion of the music swell over him and muses:
“They had smiled often, with this kind of happiness. They had smiled on the pillow. And then. . . .
A complete surprise, and shock. That was all.
How simple. Just love.
Again, all was resolved: serenely this time. Not so thunderously. The world and life were to be properly enjoyed. It was all there. It was up to oneself. This was what it sounded like when you achieved it. Serenity after. . . .” (the missing word at the end of that quote being “passion” - a line from a poem referenced earlier on).
It’s enormously refreshing that Carleton comes to this conclusion. Characters heavy with guilt and shame are common in gay literature but Lord Dismiss Us stresses that it doesn’t have to be that way. Though his attempts to patch things up with Allen are unsuccessful, the book thankfully doesn’t end on a sad note. The short story Carleton has written is to be published! He has a future.
By the very end, Carleton can no longer be compared to Ashley. Their trajectories are not the same. He isn’t tormented by his lost love. He’s well-adjusted and happy and unafraid of his sexuality. You leave the book incredibly hopeful for him. How nice it would’ve been to have a sequel of him at Oxford! I really grew to love his character and the journey he went on. Alas!
February 19, 2019
My rating is the average of two reviews, one of five stars from 1968 - 5 stars, and one star from circa 2007.
In 1968 this was a seminal work, no pun intended. It was likely unique. It portrayed my world, the one I write about in Queer Me!: Halfway Between Flying and Crying. It was a breath of spring in my life. Then I could not praise it too highly.
In the 21st century, though, I was disappointed. I found it had a great need for an editor, because the side plot about the headmaster and his attempts to stamp out relationships between the boys was overbearing. The book was about boys, two boys. It's a plot I know well. With certain exceptions I have lived that plot. Idea like to have seen the book major on that.
In 1968 this was a seminal work, no pun intended. It was likely unique. It portrayed my world, the one I write about in Queer Me!: Halfway Between Flying and Crying. It was a breath of spring in my life. Then I could not praise it too highly.
In the 21st century, though, I was disappointed. I found it had a great need for an editor, because the side plot about the headmaster and his attempts to stamp out relationships between the boys was overbearing. The book was about boys, two boys. It's a plot I know well. With certain exceptions I have lived that plot. Idea like to have seen the book major on that.
May 12, 2019
An interesting read, and one that I can say I enjoyed. I saw a play version of this book at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, and ever since the story has been on my mind. I decided to read it, and finished it over the course of about two weeks. As a teenager myself, it is an interesting perspective about LGBT issues from a time beyond my own, and from a class of person, again, beyond my own. At some point in the story, it was confusing to follow, as perspoectives kept changing, and the names used also changed. However, I would say that overall, the story was compelling, but due to the changing perspectives, it could be hard to connect to the characters, as we felt disconnected from them.
March 6, 2020
It's 'of its time'. Some of the characters are good and the setting was certainly still authentic c. 1970 - I have no more recent knowledge of private boarding schools. In places the pace seems to almost grind to a halt and much of the 'action' is written so euphemistically as to be almost incomprehensible to a modern reader, but this reflects things that probably could not be said in print when it was first published. The ending is a tangle of loose ends - characters who had become some of the most interesting perish and other central characters simply disappear into the sunset which seems rather unsatisfactory but maybe I missed the point!
July 26, 2017
I really wanted to like this book but found it hard to get through. Everyone has a first name, a last name, a nickname, and a title / position, and all are the characters are referenced by all of them! And there was head-hopping even within chapters. So I always had to figure out who was talking. And the payoff / crux of the story was such that it could've been a short story. I ended up skimming the second half of the book just to get through it. Some may not agree, but that was my experience.
Did Not Finish
December 8, 2024Couldn't get into it. Too much head hopping.
January 11, 2025
Found this particularly difficult to get into. The barrage of character names in the first few pages was particularly difficult to get over.
January 2, 2026
the concept of a not like other girls gay boy. Just incredible
October 9, 2026
In his last year at an English boarding school, a boy falls in love with a younger classmate.
Not as special to me as my favorite, Good Times/Bad Times, but it has a similarities: same subject, published around the same time, characters' parents being actors, of all things. This was happier and more upbeat than the other, though, besides Ashley's suicide at the end. Both books portray love between boys as pure but paint adult gay men as tragic figures—not sure what was going on there, since both authors were gay. Maybe that was just the ’60s.
But I'm glad I read this: it was on my list for years, and I'm happy to have finally gotten around to it. It's one of the best portrayals of your first love I've read in a long time.
Not as special to me as my favorite, Good Times/Bad Times, but it has a similarities: same subject, published around the same time, characters' parents being actors, of all things. This was happier and more upbeat than the other, though, besides Ashley's suicide at the end. Both books portray love between boys as pure but paint adult gay men as tragic figures—not sure what was going on there, since both authors were gay. Maybe that was just the ’60s.
But I'm glad I read this: it was on my list for years, and I'm happy to have finally gotten around to it. It's one of the best portrayals of your first love I've read in a long time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2017
I almost loved this novel, but started suspecting I should abandon it at about page 250/384, and I wish I had, for some very good reasons. Altho the author took explicit pains to convince us of his writing skills, in the final analysis he missed the most important writing objective, namely simply that the end must be consistent with the beginning.
Throughout the first 80 percent of the work, the main characters are consistent, even puzzlingly so and a little artificially. But for whatever reason, Campbell decides to betray the reader in the last several chapters by portraying behavior which is unbelievable and cannot reasonably be extrapolated from his original presentation of them. This made me angry.
As a psychologist, I tried to figure out the motivation behind his inability to treat us, the readers, fairly. Without more data than the novel itself contains, of course, I cannot say for certain, but my strong hypothesis is that he was personally extremely disappointed in his own homosexuality and, whether planned or not, expressing this disappointment became his agenda for the novel. This personal involvement ended up involving him so deeply in the story that his admitted good writing skills went straight out the window and the readers are the sufferers for it, since it is impossible to feel positive about a novel which is dishonest in such a basic point as its character portrayal.
I sincerely recommend giving it a miss.
Throughout the first 80 percent of the work, the main characters are consistent, even puzzlingly so and a little artificially. But for whatever reason, Campbell decides to betray the reader in the last several chapters by portraying behavior which is unbelievable and cannot reasonably be extrapolated from his original presentation of them. This made me angry.
As a psychologist, I tried to figure out the motivation behind his inability to treat us, the readers, fairly. Without more data than the novel itself contains, of course, I cannot say for certain, but my strong hypothesis is that he was personally extremely disappointed in his own homosexuality and, whether planned or not, expressing this disappointment became his agenda for the novel. This personal involvement ended up involving him so deeply in the story that his admitted good writing skills went straight out the window and the readers are the sufferers for it, since it is impossible to feel positive about a novel which is dishonest in such a basic point as its character portrayal.
I sincerely recommend giving it a miss.
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