Yes, the school is strict but it’s nothing beyond what you could still find today in parochial schools in the US. As I read it, I kept thinking of Ishiguro’s book, Never Let Me Go, where the kids are being groomed to give their body parts as organ donors. The author sets it all up as if this social experiment was somehow Nazi-ish or Big Brotherish. I had a hard time with the basic premise of the book. There are sections where the author turns academic on us, literally giving us a chapter or so on a “brief history of time.” Lol, and he does refer to Stephen Hawking’s book of that name, as well as making references to philosophers such as Kant, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, and others.
When you look at it with awareness, or start to touch it, then it starts to disintegrate.”
The author puts some pretty big thought into these unformed minds: “I tried to tell him that time, at the school, was being pulled downward into a spiral.” Or “Time is no law of nature…It is a plan. There is a lot of philosophical speculation on time, order, and scales of good and better.
They plan an ill-fated escape in which the older boy and the girl see themselves as ‘parents’ to the younger boy who is ill, physically and mentally. The children aren’t told the nature of these experiments, so the three main characters form an alliance to find out what’s happening by breaking into offices and looking at official records and teachers’ notes. There is corporal punishment – kids are struck for misbehavior. The playground is ruled off into zones, allowing only certain kids to interact with each other. There is little one-on-one interaction between the children only incidental contact is allowed. The school is strict and it regulates their time. (Or both – one boy killed his abusive parents.) The headmaster is running experiments to show if ‘damaged’ kids can be integrated back into society. They were placed there by the state because they were orphans or delinquents. Three kids, two boys and a girl, age 14 to 16 or so, are in a strict private school. It’s a fairly simple story line set in Copenhagen in the mid-1970’s. I liked the author’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (well, it was OK – I read it long before I started writing GR reviews). I’ve seen it a dozen times in used book stores and at library book sales and I finally decided to read it.
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