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North
This is a literary thriller, a psychological drama about good and evil that explores confused sexuality and describes the intricate game of love in the contemporary world. It exposes the lives of six people who attend a school in Oxford either as student or teacher. The narrator of the story, a middle-aged man of means, is almost as enigmatic as his subject, North, a strange, elegant, charismatic Anglo-American youth. The handsome, precocious North begins a three-way relationship between himself, a beautiful 27 year-old woman teacher, and a young married, but bisexual, head of Physics who is good-looking, athletic, and evangelically Christian. As the novel proceeds in various settings, Oxford, London, Ravello, Washington DC, a confidential intimacy evolves between the narrator and North and the suspense mounts as North reveals his plans for systematic seduction. The players in the game of love become entangled in sexual anarchy that accelerates the novel towards its decisive, cataclysmic climax. At the end there is an abiding mystery and an acute sense of potent evil. The reader is left wondering if there have been certain moral imperatives that have made the narrator tell less than the whole truth.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 2006
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March 12, 2020
The silk of North’s web was beginning stick to, and wrap around, his female prey. What was his design? What did he want? Was he just in need of diversion? I knew that the answer was not that simple.
North is the debut novel by English writer Brian Martin, (awarded the MBE for English Literature), with a seventies feel, that had been on my to TBR list since joining Good Reads. At that time I sought to broaden my reading tastes and - dare I say it – tilt at literary pretention. Billed as written in the vein of John Fowles, North (first or last name is unclear), is the eighteen year old son of an English socialite and American financier, in his final year at school in Oxford, impossibly handsome, well-dressed, suave and sophisticated beyond his years, he believes he is destined for greatness.
In other words, a privileged “twat” living in rarified air. North is without a moral compass, sets about seducing first Bernie, at 25 the attractive youthful head of History, and physics teacher Monty, a keen sportsman, former Cambridge blue, a born-again Christian and favourite of the principal, his wife Jess heavily pregnant. As well as bonking North, Monty is in a “love triangle” with Bernie.
There were all sorts of rocks in Monty’s passage, some visible, some half - submerged, and some, I reckoned, completely hidden…
North watched Bernie. He watched Monty. He said nothing to me, or to anyone else. He made his move, and it was the move of a practised master of the game: it was as though he had decided to attack on a military front after studying the maps and defining his strategy. He acted unilaterally. He did not discuss with other generals and he took no political advice. He certainly did not confide in me.
The narrator is North’s mentor, a writer and senior staffer in English literature at the 550-year old school, though some of the action takes place in London (meaning Mayfair) – the two orbiting each other like satellites, with the occasional sortie to the Tate Modern and taking in a riské exhibition in Birmingham.
The mentor tells the reader ad nauseum how handsome and worldly North is while forecasting disaster on an epic scale. If the mentor has a name I must have skipped over it. We learn his wife is in a vegetative state following an accident, his two sons grown and moved away, he lives alone with a cat and drives a BMW – is a member of a London club (read Mayfair) so I wondered if this was a treatise on middle-aged loneliness and that he is secretly jealous of North, though his faith and principles will not allow him to admit it.
I went out into the garden and picked a rose for my buttonhole. There was a beautiful pink miniature, a Cecile Brunner, which kept flowering most of the summer and provided me with a supply of buds. I had discovered that as a plucked rose faded and died, so its scent grew more fragrant, which is why its petals go to make up pot–pourri. How different from the lily, which, as it decays and rots, smells vile and reeks of its corruption.
On the up side, the trips to Washington/New York (the Guggenheim) and the Terazza dell’ Infinito at the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast south of Naples, in conjunction with a poetry festival, are well-described. I learned that Laphroaig has the flavours of seaweed and peat, and that Graeme Greene drank J&B. As a science major the ramblings on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot and Chaucer were “lost” on me, as was the endless circuit of café’s, restaurants, friends “in the theatre” or “artists in residence” or dinner with the principle.
Obviously there is an invisible army of fairies out there for grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning. Not a tradesman to be seen though the mentor makes a churlish remark about heavy trucks on the motorway.
In the dying pages I hoped to see one of the participants in the sordid affair killed off, perhaps the absent father, cutting North off from his largesse, forcing him to earn his keep, but more likely to take on a sponsor he can seduce, manipulate and blackmail. I got my wish but not as expected. It was all too tedious, the more so by a lack of chapters, with one scene seguing into the next.
Verdict: One for those smitten by the literary arts scene, but I leave it to others to compare to Fowles.
North is the debut novel by English writer Brian Martin, (awarded the MBE for English Literature), with a seventies feel, that had been on my to TBR list since joining Good Reads. At that time I sought to broaden my reading tastes and - dare I say it – tilt at literary pretention. Billed as written in the vein of John Fowles, North (first or last name is unclear), is the eighteen year old son of an English socialite and American financier, in his final year at school in Oxford, impossibly handsome, well-dressed, suave and sophisticated beyond his years, he believes he is destined for greatness.
In other words, a privileged “twat” living in rarified air. North is without a moral compass, sets about seducing first Bernie, at 25 the attractive youthful head of History, and physics teacher Monty, a keen sportsman, former Cambridge blue, a born-again Christian and favourite of the principal, his wife Jess heavily pregnant. As well as bonking North, Monty is in a “love triangle” with Bernie.
There were all sorts of rocks in Monty’s passage, some visible, some half - submerged, and some, I reckoned, completely hidden…
North watched Bernie. He watched Monty. He said nothing to me, or to anyone else. He made his move, and it was the move of a practised master of the game: it was as though he had decided to attack on a military front after studying the maps and defining his strategy. He acted unilaterally. He did not discuss with other generals and he took no political advice. He certainly did not confide in me.
The narrator is North’s mentor, a writer and senior staffer in English literature at the 550-year old school, though some of the action takes place in London (meaning Mayfair) – the two orbiting each other like satellites, with the occasional sortie to the Tate Modern and taking in a riské exhibition in Birmingham.
The mentor tells the reader ad nauseum how handsome and worldly North is while forecasting disaster on an epic scale. If the mentor has a name I must have skipped over it. We learn his wife is in a vegetative state following an accident, his two sons grown and moved away, he lives alone with a cat and drives a BMW – is a member of a London club (read Mayfair) so I wondered if this was a treatise on middle-aged loneliness and that he is secretly jealous of North, though his faith and principles will not allow him to admit it.
I went out into the garden and picked a rose for my buttonhole. There was a beautiful pink miniature, a Cecile Brunner, which kept flowering most of the summer and provided me with a supply of buds. I had discovered that as a plucked rose faded and died, so its scent grew more fragrant, which is why its petals go to make up pot–pourri. How different from the lily, which, as it decays and rots, smells vile and reeks of its corruption.
On the up side, the trips to Washington/New York (the Guggenheim) and the Terazza dell’ Infinito at the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast south of Naples, in conjunction with a poetry festival, are well-described. I learned that Laphroaig has the flavours of seaweed and peat, and that Graeme Greene drank J&B. As a science major the ramblings on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot and Chaucer were “lost” on me, as was the endless circuit of café’s, restaurants, friends “in the theatre” or “artists in residence” or dinner with the principle.
Obviously there is an invisible army of fairies out there for grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning. Not a tradesman to be seen though the mentor makes a churlish remark about heavy trucks on the motorway.
In the dying pages I hoped to see one of the participants in the sordid affair killed off, perhaps the absent father, cutting North off from his largesse, forcing him to earn his keep, but more likely to take on a sponsor he can seduce, manipulate and blackmail. I got my wish but not as expected. It was all too tedious, the more so by a lack of chapters, with one scene seguing into the next.
Verdict: One for those smitten by the literary arts scene, but I leave it to others to compare to Fowles.
January 13, 2026
North, that is his entire name, is a wealthy Anglo-American bisexual utterly amoral teenaged schoolboy who manages to wreck havoc on an independent school in Oxford early in this century. His name is never explained, but like so many teens, North tries to model himself on a favourite literary character. In his case it is Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but Satan as imagined by that famous Oxford-expellee Percy Shelley or by atheist literary critic William Empson, definitely not by C. S. Lewis (though allusions to that distinguished Magdalen College fellow pop up occasionally in this novel). But recalling that after Milton’s Satan hatches his scheme to rebel against God, the bad angels withdraw to the north, I’d suggest that direction may have suggested the name of the principal character.
In the course of the story, North uses his sexual magnetism to sow chaos, managing an affair with Jenny, the drama teacher, Monty, the games master, a Cambridge blue, as well as orchestrating an affair between Monty and the Head of the School, the last a wonderful portent of the contemporary school ‘Superhead’: ‘He was the product of a big inner city comprehensive school and had gained his position in the independent sector through ability and efficiency. He was one of those institutional administrators who cannot bear to have power delegated to those below him.’
As a reader and writer of school stories myself, I could easily spot antecedents for North, especially Simon Raven’s Fielding Grey. And like Fielding’s, much of North’s genetic profile derives from Wilde’s Dorian Gray, though we can trace it back to Plato’s Alcibiades in the Symposium. I didn’t find North very convincing as a character, especially as it’s almost impossible to imagine any American teenaged boy, however Anglicised, with any social skills at all, much less one who would refer to San Francisco as ‘San Fran’.
My favourite character, though also the most infuriating, was the narrator, an elderly widower who had served in the army in the last days of national service in Cyprus (like Fielding, though unlike Fielding he’d not had half his face blown off by a terrorist bomb). He likes to drop literary allusions, though they are largely to the most familiar poems by Donne, Milton, Pope, and Keats that all of us ex-English professors taught year after year. He drives a BMW and affects the style of Mr Worldly Wiseman and if you read this novel yourself as a teenager, you might take him for an international sophisticate.
I’ll not reveal what becomes of North himself, but the setting for the denouement is the same as that in the conclusion of another famous Oxford novel, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night.
In the course of the story, North uses his sexual magnetism to sow chaos, managing an affair with Jenny, the drama teacher, Monty, the games master, a Cambridge blue, as well as orchestrating an affair between Monty and the Head of the School, the last a wonderful portent of the contemporary school ‘Superhead’: ‘He was the product of a big inner city comprehensive school and had gained his position in the independent sector through ability and efficiency. He was one of those institutional administrators who cannot bear to have power delegated to those below him.’
As a reader and writer of school stories myself, I could easily spot antecedents for North, especially Simon Raven’s Fielding Grey. And like Fielding’s, much of North’s genetic profile derives from Wilde’s Dorian Gray, though we can trace it back to Plato’s Alcibiades in the Symposium. I didn’t find North very convincing as a character, especially as it’s almost impossible to imagine any American teenaged boy, however Anglicised, with any social skills at all, much less one who would refer to San Francisco as ‘San Fran’.
My favourite character, though also the most infuriating, was the narrator, an elderly widower who had served in the army in the last days of national service in Cyprus (like Fielding, though unlike Fielding he’d not had half his face blown off by a terrorist bomb). He likes to drop literary allusions, though they are largely to the most familiar poems by Donne, Milton, Pope, and Keats that all of us ex-English professors taught year after year. He drives a BMW and affects the style of Mr Worldly Wiseman and if you read this novel yourself as a teenager, you might take him for an international sophisticate.
I’ll not reveal what becomes of North himself, but the setting for the denouement is the same as that in the conclusion of another famous Oxford novel, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night.
December 16, 2018
What a let-down this book is!
Yes, we get it: North, the eponymous character whose full name we oddly never learn, is unique; yes, he is charismatic and sexy; yes, he is naturally sophisticated; yes, he is impossibly good-looking; yes, he is inexplicably mature beyond his years; yes, he is mysterious; and yes, he is even "dangerous"!
Is he some sort of supernatural being? An escapee from the Twilight series, perhaps? Is he a fallen angel? The incarnation of Milton's Satan/Lucifer (he, the narrator, and seemingly everyone else in the book, is fascinated by Paradise Lost)?
The suspense is building. The reader expects some grand revelation, some sudden insight into North's personage and his motivations, some satisfactory twist towards the end of the book that would make its reading all worthwhile. How will the narrator (and through him the author) convincingly extricate himself from all those hyperboles that litter the text? This is certainly what kept me turning the pages despite ever-growing misgivings.
Instead we get an abrupt and unexplained ending that doesn't quite belong to the narrative and doesn't illuminate in any way the preceding events. A little before that there is a short public shouting match and the discovery of an illicit kiss/relationship. Both very tame events are described as awful by the narrator, harbinger of the apocalypse, no less (I'm not making this up), and we must take his word for it, even if we don't agree with his uppraisal in the slightest.
Personally, I think North is just a clever, rich kid with a touch of the sociopath in him. But in case you don't get how absolutely amazing he is, the point is laboured again and again throughout the book.
And let's talk about that narrator, whose name is only mentioned once (and which I forget)!
He is presented to us as a very well-to-do, erudite, thoughtful, and wise lecturer in literature (though bizarrely, he works in a school, not a university); a revered mentor for his pupils, a welcome counsel for his friends and acquaintances. He is at one remote from the world, taking a stoic spectator's seat at the theatre of life, after some unexplained accident that happened to his wife (it's not clear whether she is dead or not). He tells us he is religious though he also appears to be rather amoral. And he drinks a lot of Champagne.
Yet, as we read his tale, we discover him to have the emotional maturity of a 12 year old and the foresight of a mole. The slightest positive comment made to him (such as "I like you") makes him "feel special" and "flattered". Not only does he not object to North's inappropriate behaviour, he actively encourages him without regards for the fairly predictable consequences on the lives of those involved.
The man is also forever contradicting himself and he seems an adept at self-delusion. Despite denying it, he is in thrall of North, and while he repeatedly claims that, should he ask something or other from North, he would be given a straight answer without the slightest problem, because their relationship is so special, he usually never asks and is just as likely to tells us that North is just too mysterious and inscrutable, and a master at eluding his enquiries.
This is sadly not a flawed character or an unreliable narrator we are presented with, however, but rather, I'm afraid, one badly written by an author who hasn't given enough thought to what he has put on the page. The never-ending repetitions, and ridiculous dialogues (particularly towards the end), not to mention such clangers as "Aitkens greeted cheerily him" (p136), are our all-to-obvious clues to this. The other characters are little more than cardboard cutouts.
It's also not clear when the story is set. For the first half of the book, it would seem to be the 1980's but then it's quite clearly the 2000's. Perhaps the manuscript laid dormant for some time during the 1990's?
In any case, this book, which in so many ways purports to deal with the ineffable, with the intangible stimuli that shunt people's perceptions of each other, their relationships and their behaviours towards one another, is in fact as clumsy, unsubtle and hammy as it is possible to be.
The result is mildly entertaining and mostly nicely written but is ultimately totally unsatisfactory and pointless. Only approach if you have nothing else to read.
Yes, we get it: North, the eponymous character whose full name we oddly never learn, is unique; yes, he is charismatic and sexy; yes, he is naturally sophisticated; yes, he is impossibly good-looking; yes, he is inexplicably mature beyond his years; yes, he is mysterious; and yes, he is even "dangerous"!
Is he some sort of supernatural being? An escapee from the Twilight series, perhaps? Is he a fallen angel? The incarnation of Milton's Satan/Lucifer (he, the narrator, and seemingly everyone else in the book, is fascinated by Paradise Lost)?
The suspense is building. The reader expects some grand revelation, some sudden insight into North's personage and his motivations, some satisfactory twist towards the end of the book that would make its reading all worthwhile. How will the narrator (and through him the author) convincingly extricate himself from all those hyperboles that litter the text? This is certainly what kept me turning the pages despite ever-growing misgivings.
Instead we get an abrupt and unexplained ending that doesn't quite belong to the narrative and doesn't illuminate in any way the preceding events. A little before that there is a short public shouting match and the discovery of an illicit kiss/relationship. Both very tame events are described as awful by the narrator, harbinger of the apocalypse, no less (I'm not making this up), and we must take his word for it, even if we don't agree with his uppraisal in the slightest.
Personally, I think North is just a clever, rich kid with a touch of the sociopath in him. But in case you don't get how absolutely amazing he is, the point is laboured again and again throughout the book.
And let's talk about that narrator, whose name is only mentioned once (and which I forget)!
He is presented to us as a very well-to-do, erudite, thoughtful, and wise lecturer in literature (though bizarrely, he works in a school, not a university); a revered mentor for his pupils, a welcome counsel for his friends and acquaintances. He is at one remote from the world, taking a stoic spectator's seat at the theatre of life, after some unexplained accident that happened to his wife (it's not clear whether she is dead or not). He tells us he is religious though he also appears to be rather amoral. And he drinks a lot of Champagne.
Yet, as we read his tale, we discover him to have the emotional maturity of a 12 year old and the foresight of a mole. The slightest positive comment made to him (such as "I like you") makes him "feel special" and "flattered". Not only does he not object to North's inappropriate behaviour, he actively encourages him without regards for the fairly predictable consequences on the lives of those involved.
The man is also forever contradicting himself and he seems an adept at self-delusion. Despite denying it, he is in thrall of North, and while he repeatedly claims that, should he ask something or other from North, he would be given a straight answer without the slightest problem, because their relationship is so special, he usually never asks and is just as likely to tells us that North is just too mysterious and inscrutable, and a master at eluding his enquiries.
This is sadly not a flawed character or an unreliable narrator we are presented with, however, but rather, I'm afraid, one badly written by an author who hasn't given enough thought to what he has put on the page. The never-ending repetitions, and ridiculous dialogues (particularly towards the end), not to mention such clangers as "Aitkens greeted cheerily him" (p136), are our all-to-obvious clues to this. The other characters are little more than cardboard cutouts.
It's also not clear when the story is set. For the first half of the book, it would seem to be the 1980's but then it's quite clearly the 2000's. Perhaps the manuscript laid dormant for some time during the 1990's?
In any case, this book, which in so many ways purports to deal with the ineffable, with the intangible stimuli that shunt people's perceptions of each other, their relationships and their behaviours towards one another, is in fact as clumsy, unsubtle and hammy as it is possible to be.
The result is mildly entertaining and mostly nicely written but is ultimately totally unsatisfactory and pointless. Only approach if you have nothing else to read.
September 22, 2014
A strange narrative that grew on me, and achieved a kind of resonance, despite much of the plotting relying on people running into each other. I'm not that familiar with Milton and Paradise Lost, but I suspect there are many references here concerning the nature of evil.
I felt that some of the professors should have been better armed against seduction by a student; however, that too is probably a reference to the great seducer against which we are powerless.
Fascinating.
I felt that some of the professors should have been better armed against seduction by a student; however, that too is probably a reference to the great seducer against which we are powerless.
Fascinating.
Read
August 4, 2011It's the kind of book that leaves you thinking about it for a long time. So successfully does Brian Martin take you through a dark and psychological journey, that it is only when you finish the book and look back on the story do you realize how far from normal you have travelled.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews