Novel of the week Francesca Carington
THE SANDPIT by Nicholas Shakespeare
After a 10-year fiction hiatus
(in which he produced some terrific non-fiction), Nicholas Shakespeare returns to the form with an Oxford-set thriller about prep-school-centric skulduggery.
John Dyer is an ex-foreign correspondent and single father who’s moved to rainy Oxford from Brazil so that his young son can attend Dyer’s alma mater, the Phoenix, a top prep school, which is given oddly prominent billing in Dyer’s sense of self. He finds it now populated with the children of jet-set foreigners, masonically connected to each other and the ruling elite. His sole almost-friend among the parents is Rustum Marvar, an Iranian scientist, who goes missing along with his son after confiding to Dyer that he’s cracked the mysteries of nuclear fusion. Suddenly, fellow parents – from Gazprom wives to Canadian financiers – are very interested in the information with which Dyer has been entrusted. Meanwhile Dyer vacillates between doubt at Marvar’s claim (“It sounded like a speech he’d rehearsed in the loo”) and his own ability to judge it.
Shakespeare is an ebullient writer, and he has fun with the shady parents. Dyer, despite his establishment roots, is now (in their eyes) a mangy outsider. Their own pasts, meanwhile, can be expunged by the school’s prestige: “For a number of foreign parents in possession of what Balzac had called ‘great fortunes without apparent cause’, the Phoenix was where they laundered their children.” There are lovely reminiscences on South America, although Shakespeare doesn’t rate his readers’ foreignaffairs knowledge, giving some clunky exposition. And for an insistently contemporary novel, it can feel dated – sometimes sweetly, with phrases like “surfing the internet” and an 11-year-old saying “bosom”; sometimes not, such as a thin man “disappearing on himself like an anorexic girl”. As a whole, it’s an interestingly conditional thriller, a Schrödinger’s drama in which the action spirals out from an enormous maybe, resulting in a paranoia-filled page-turner.