Walking a thin line
A darkly comic tale of rich girls, eating disorders and narcissism at an English boarding school.
Didn’t you like being our teacher?” one of the boarding-school girls at the centre of this story asks an ex-teacher. “No, I didn’t like being your teacher … you’re all so shallow and annoying,” he responds before (wrongly) accusing them of having driven another teacher to suicide.
Shallow and annoying are certainly the first impressions made by these six rich girls dumped at an old-fashioned boarding school in rural England. They obsess about their weight and look down their aristocratic noses at the local ‘‘plebs’’, incurious about everything except their appearance. Do they even care about each other?
But by the end, after their halfbaked scramble to rescue one of their number from a predator hiding in plain sight, they had won me over.
The story is mainly told from the perspective of 15-year-old Tash, recently acknowledged by a Russian oligarch as his daughter. She’s been sent to the school so she can go to Oxbridge (fat chance, given the teaching standard). Tash falls in
with the “bad apples”: five girls who diet competitively and scrutinise each other’s bodies with startling intensity for any change in fat or muscle tone.
After an apparent diet-related death, the school brings in two bizarre male therapists to counsel the girls. “Like, where do you even get two therapists who look so much like paedophiles?” the girls wonder. An example of the
There are no adults in the room. The wealthy parents are elsewhere, the teachers are one or more of jealous/ negligent/insane.
therapists’ guidance includes: “Even if you don’t die of anorexia itself … there are plenty of other ways to die … Have you ever seen a sex slave being fed to a tiger? It’s not f---ing pretty, I can tell you. Fat girls don’t get fed to tigers.”
The diet obsession intensifies; there’s nothing to stop it. There are no adults in the room. The wealthy parents are elsewhere, the teachers are one or more of jealous/negligent/insane. Tash’s aunt, whom she stays with on the holidays, is a version of the way the girls are headed: fashionably skeletal, rich, narcissistic.
She redeems herself slightly towards the end when she shows Tash a slide show of women with power – Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Oprah Winfrey, Theresa May – followed by one of thin, glamorous celebrity women. The message for Tash is that women with power all look different; celebrity woman have no power and all look the same. Tash appreciates the effort in “basic feminist grounding”.
Back at school, as another death seems likely, Tash stirs her friends into action.
But plot is not the focus here: Oligarchy is a funny, deeply cynical and insightful riff on narcissism, obsessions and boarding-school life. It’s full of odd but effective description: “He has the eyes of a lifeguard who lets people drown”; “[she] cries the soft tears of a day girl with mild PMT”. Some reviewers have cautioned that the anorexia material may be triggering. It’s clearly a book aimed at adults.
The problem of tone, of so much humour when you’re dealing with anorexia and abuse, could easily have sunk Oligarchy. But Thomas, author of nine other adult novels and three children’s books, makes it work brilliantly.