‘Notes on a Scandal’ by Zoe Heller
Oh, how I love a good tale within a tale! Such ideas are at work here in Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, a novel that is every bit as delicious and, well, scandalous as the title suggests. The book details the illicit love affair between forty-one-year-old pottery teacher Sheba Hart and her fifteen-year-old pupil Steven Connolly - scandal indeed! Yet rather than presenting an objective account of events put forth by an all-seeing omniscient narrator, the story of Sheba and Connolly's clandestine relations is told instead by Barbara Covett, Sheba's faithful confidante, and a fellow teacher at St. George's. Barbara, an ageing, bookish spinster who has spent the last fifteen years of her life living with only her beloved cat, gifts Heller's novel with a gloriously unreliable and somewhat biased record of her friend's machinations. And, oddly enough, it is Barbara's reductive recollections that give Notes on a Scandal a difficult-to-define magic.
The novel's main strength is its ability to suck you straight into Sheba Hart's morally compromised world, a world in which it is permissible to have sexual relations with a boy younger than your own teenage daughter. Notes on a Scandal puts the reader in what I am going to term a 'literary headlock' - the pages turn at the speed of those of a flip book; you look up from the words at the world around you and find yourself struggling to differentiate between the two. In terms of sheer 'readability' (forgive me, I've heard the term bandied about a lot of late), Notes on a Scandal must surely occupy a place in the upper echelons.
It is my personal belief that Notes on a Scandal is a novel more readily suited to female readers than males, though this is not to impugn Heller's writing in any way - frothy chick-lit this is most definitely not. However, given that the book's key players are female and that the narrator is also, it seems an important point to make. And on a more superficial note - books, covers, that old chestnut - this limited edition 'tattoo' cover, designed by Valerie Vargas of London's Frith Street Tattoo, is also pretty spiffing to look at.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2011.