Oligarchy

Oligarchy is a sharp, dark novel about rich teenagers, eating disorders, and the secrets of a boarding school. Tash is the daughter of a Russian oligarch and has suddenly been sent to an English boarding school. The wifi use is restricted, the hierarchies are strange, and everyone is obsessed with looks and eating even though they can barely get on Instagram without surreptitious means. She ends up part of the group of troublemakers, all willing to go further than the rest, but when one of them, Bianca, vanishes and the school seems weirdly inept at dealing with the eating disorder epidemic, it seems there could be more at play.

The first things to know about this novel are that it is very much focused around disordered eating in various ways, and that it is a kind of twisted adult novel rather than the YA title some people might assume from a very brief summary. Coming into the book with the right expectations seems important, as then its blend of fantastical and deeply cutting will be making points and exploring darkness rather than seeming in strange taste. The third person narration is mostly around Tash's perspective, with a side plot of Russian-backwater-to-riches and a shady aunt who lives in London that you almost want more of. In general, the book is more focused on small details and dark, witty moments than the overall pace of narrative, and these are what creates its tone, taking both teenage peer pressure and power abuse in boarding schools to particular heights for effect.

Oligarchy is an in-your-face novel that won't be for everyone, a dark look at body image and how the internet can exacerbate mental states around things like eating disorders that also manages to be witty and strange.

I have been a fan of the author for a long time as I think she is very original, her books are always sharply observed and humorous. ‘Oligarchy’ is classic Scarlett Thomas in that it pulls no punches but this thought provoking and dark tale is embedded in black humour which I love. This is a book about power and control and there several different ways that the girls we meet in the book are controlled.

The central character is Natasha, who is Russian and the daughter of an oligarch. She is sent to boarding school in England and I reckon this must be the worst one in existence! Here she is thrown into a world where there is a pecking order, a hierarchy whose rules are initially baffling, but where the outside world in the form of social media, especially Instagram is of paramount importance. The author clearly demonstrates how social media might pervert the minds of the impressionable into a certain way of thinking, that it has power and a hold in the same way as an oligarch heads a criminal organisation. How you look, what you wear, where you go are all judged, often harshly. Natasha encounters eating disorders which is the central theme as this has control over the girls and wields enormous power. Food or the lack of, is also an oligarch as calories are frantically countered and punishing exercise is undertaken as the obsession with being thin dominates them..However, there is also a physical oligarch too who controls the girls and their minds and Natasha sets out to unmask this oligarch. I found this very shocking when I realised exactly what occurs to the girls and how their minds are manipulated.

This book is very well written. The author has a very original way of writing and she is very funny. Some of the ideas the girls have such as that sherbet dib-dobs (we call them dib-dabs, sherbet fountains. I used to love the explosion of sherbet in my mouth!) are wholesome because they are old fashioned which made me laugh. The characters are mostly very likeable especially Natasha, and her Aunt Sonja and I also love Tiffanie with her glorious French accented English. However, the book has a flip side. There are moments of sadness as the girls strife to recover happiness, the thinner they become they lose their real selves. They may have light bodies but they have heavy hearts. Indeed, as the book progresses it gets darker and twistier as some of the girls see most things as pointless. I like the way we see into the mind of Bianca whose disappearance is the subject of Natasha’s investigation and Natasha herself. It feels authentic and how a young girl may reflect on the things that are happening around them and try to make sense of it. Natasha is heroic in lots of ways and she’s certainly the hero of this tale.

Overall, it’s a terrific but terrifying read. It is a no holds barred presentation of how people can be controlled which is very scary. It makes you think, you ask questions, it’s shocking, it’s funny, it’s mysterious, it’s sad, it’s rule breaking, it’s imaginative and very current. Many thanks to Cannongate and NetGalley for the ARC.

I was delighted to discover a new book by Scarlett Thomas, and wasn’t disappointed - she has an amazing way of writing about unexpected topics

Oligarchy was not at all what I'd expected from Scarlett Thomas - although she is an author who writes about varied and different topics, a meditation on life in a high-society girl's school was not something I envisioned her next book being. However, as with everything else she's written about, she writes about it masterfully. This novel draws you in to the strange lives of its characters, the inanities, anxieties, issues, or being a teenage girl at boarding school. The characters are interesting, believable, and there's a wistful tone about the book; it's, unusually, written in the present tense which gives it a transience, an evanescence, reflective of the time spent as a teenager, at school. It's an odd but wonderful little novel, that deals with subjects such as suicide and anorexia whilst managing to stay light and humourous, but still gentle and sympathetic. Scarlett Thomas cleverly evokes how it feels to be a fifteen-year-old girl, one abandoned to private education by rich parents, and, moreover, what it feels like to be a gang of fifteen-year-old girls, the dialogue, the fashions, the insults, the attitude. It's very clever, it's very fashionable, very NOW - the slang being adept and appropriate, the girls' discussions being pitch perfect. I love Scarlett Thomas's way of writing; it's so authentic, and she peppers her prose with questions, direct questions, talking to her reader and making the book a conversation. She's not assured, as a writer, she deliberates and offers possibilities, not facts; it's unusual as most writers just tell you how it is - and that's fine too, but there's something warm and sweet about this different and unusual style. It also worked beautifully in this book given that her characters are teenagers - full of doubt, full of questions themselves. For me, she's a contemporary of Douglas Coupland - I'm still wondering where he has disappeared to this past decade - but she's English and all the better for that. Her settings are dark and moorlike; Totnes, Devon, very English, very windswept, very visual. I loved this, and the ending was just entirely perfect. My only negative is that I could have read a book two or three times as long and still loved every minute - although it was perfect as it was, I want more from Scarlett Thomas and now!

Mallory Towers for our late capitalist age. It's bleak, full of disconnection and isolation. Characters are distanced from their families, refuse to speak the same language as others, sneer at other social classes. Everyone in the book seems to have an emptiness at their core, a void that they try to fill with social media and consumerist aspiration, neither of which work. If Thomas' earlier work, like PopCo, was a sally against corporate rule of our lives and a hurrah for sticking it to the Man, this one seems to be an admission of defeat, a surrender of power and slipping down into helpless acquiescence. It's a depressing book but a strangely readable one (and as a parent of a twelve year old girl, it's frankly terrifying).

Rollicking girls’-school adventure for grown-ups.

Natasha (Tash) is plucked from Russian poverty by her absent but filthy rich father and lands in a lesser all-girls’ boarding school in Hertfordshire. She gets in with the bad apples and high jinx ensues. Along the way, Tash learns life lessons from her bad-ass aunt, a teacher goes missing and a dead body is found in the lake.

From a barnstorming first line, Oligarchy hustles along with brio. The girls’ obsessions with weight, celebrity, sex and bodily functions, are amplified in the insular hothouse of a boarding school.

In this, her tenth, adult novel, Thomas comments on the control, use and misdirection of information. She has mastered the voice of adolescent girls and interrupts inner dialogue at the prime suggestive moment. In Aunt Sonja, she has created the archetype for the wayward relative who parents frown upon and children can’t help but love. Every family should have an Aunt Sonja.

Wonderful, playful language and irreverent humour. Flippant but never trivial. Relevant and current but not preachy.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher, Canongate Books, for the ARC.

I was really looking forward to reading this new novel from Scarlett Thomas, who is one of my favourite authors. I wasn't disappointed. It's a darkly comic take on contemporary obsessions with appearance and self-promotion, and the control of young women, in the setting of an English boarding school. The characters are well-observed and the writing is razor-sharp, funny and disturbing at the same time. There is more to enjoy in the first three paragraphs than in many books I've read.
Like other novels by Thomas it has interesting things to say but never feels didactic, her style is original and light even when dealing with weighty subjects. And it's very funny.

I have been a fan of Scarlett Thomas since reading her very first novel, so I was delighted to receive her latest, for review.

This is nothing like her previous novels, but a clever, darkly humorous, look at the lives of a group of girls at a private, girls boarding school. Our main character is Natasha (Tash) the daughter of a Russian oligarch, who is packed off, as though on a whim, to study in the UK. Tash is beautiful, rich and privileged, like the other girls in her dorm. Like them, she is also desperate to be thin, as are most of the school. Afternoon tea, we are informed, was stopped after literally nobody ever ate it…

Tash meets up with an Aunt Sonja, who she had never heard of before. Sonja is older, also rich and also obsessed with food – or, rather, with not eating it. Gradually, she attempts, in a slightly confused way, to impart some knowledge and advice to her young charge. She also helps her to understand the ways of her mysterious, distant father, who is a mystery to his young daughter.

Actually, Tash has enough mysteries to deal with. First of all, there is the disappearance of Tiffanie, after her visits to the Headmaster. Then Dr Morgan vanishes. With the girls vying with each other to gain ever thinner bodies, specialists are brought in to discuss eating disorders with the girls. Meanwhile, Tash needs to discover who she is and what is going on at the school.

This is a novel about self-discovery, of belonging, peer pressure, manipulation, competition and social media. What, ultimately, makes it work is not the sharp, biting writing, but the fact that you come to care about these characters. In the wrong hands, the reader might write off these precious, precocious young women – with their black credit cards, snobbish and judgemental views and bizarre diets. However, Thomas is aware that pain and confusion are there, regardless of wealth and privilege. A wonderful novel that I enjoyed every word of. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

'Sometimes she also prays for peace, and joy, and to be thin. Sometimes she even prays for the villagers, that they might become thin too.'

The thing - one of many things - I like about Scarlett Thomas's books is that they always give something unexpected. There is no "just" to them. They are all recognisably hers, but they are also all very different and they all confound one's assumptions.

So Oligarchy is a book about a group of schoolgirls, with a mystery element, but little detection - and at the same time it's a book about the pressures modern society imposes on young women - and at the same time, a book about friendship and abuse. It's also funny, sad and truthful.

As I started the book - with Russian oligarch's daughter Natalya ('but at home they call her Natasha') coming to a scuzzy English boarding school in the Midlands - I thought it might take a fantastic turn. The village boys howl like dogs outside the school gates at night. This is not a metaphor, but it's not pursued (which boys? why?) There's also a distinctly gothic twist in the girls' mythology of the school, involving a drowning Princess, a Sultan and a diamond. The story hovers behind the action, inspiring various events and being embroidered in various ways but as with those howling boys there is no "official" explanation.

Later, with deaths occurring, and an interesting sounding detective (DI Amaryllis Archer, in her jeans and high-heeled boots) appearing on the scene, I wondered about the mystery element - but while it's there and is, eventually, resolved (kind of) that's not central either at least not in detail.

Central, rather, are the lives of the girls and the caustic, pressured expectations on them in modern society. Tash, arriving from Russia, the recently discovered daughter of an oligarch who has plucked her from obscurity and stored her away for safekeeping, is our way into the group, whose members deform almost before our eyes under the weight of those expectations. There is Bianca ('She doesn't tell anyone about the sadness and the failure and the light inside her that is a bright white colour but is never bright or white enough'). Tiffanie, who plans her funeral 'which will have a botanical theme' and who is 'too lazy, too French and frankly too fucking cool to learn English pronunciation' and whose usage of 'Ange' for English 'ing' becomes a meme among the girls. There is Becky 'with the bad hair', the would-be Head Girl.

Thomas's eye for character here is so sharp, getting right inside (Tash's Aunt Sonya 'looks like money rather than sex or love') and it's the way her ensemble of memorable, real people - most of them young women - reacts to the stresses on them that makes this book come alive and forms the gothic heart of the novel (with the oft-quoted story of Princess Augusta the topping, perhaps). There's an atmosphere of confinement, or abandonment, to this group in their strange school and of a breakdown of their sense of identity as they try to be - something. All manner of fake science, folk wisdom and wishful thinking swill around concerning what one should and should not eat, what one should be and not be. The the urge to thinness becomes almost a contagion in itself, with its own heroes and victims.

There is no restraint, no voice of reason, and a palpable sense of the girls being alone - this seems to be a singularly ill-run school where there is no help, typified by an episode where a vomiting bug has broken out and they are simply left alone, in a dormitory, to wait it out - but also very much exposed to the ill winds of social media, to the expectations of teaches, gym trainers and shifty DJs in provincial basement nightclubs. The paradoxes of teenage life - of innocence and experience ('at fifteen you have to practice everything you plan to do') - are played out here as in countless other novels, but with I think a rare sharpness of observation and deftness of portrayal ('Suze likes drinking in a pub called the Marionette ("drinking in" not "going to")')

Behind all this there are Tash's memories of home, of her mother, her boyfriend. Behind it are her doubts about her place in England, her place in the world, above all, about her place in her father's orbit. Having 'found' her he is elusive. Aunt Sonya seems to have been given the job of looking after Tash. Possibly her father wants to marry her off to the son of a business associate (there's a strange episode where she's helicoptered out to a party in a remote castle, but like many scenes in this book Thomas gives only glimpses of this, returning to it, though, several times to draw out different aspects). The run-down, dangerous feeling school doesn't feel like a good place to be trying to resolve these issues, without support or guidance - but maybe the slightly fantastical, out of this world bubble universe, the intense relationship and teenage concerns are a good balance for those family concerns?

Oligarchy is a fascinating, provoking, book, a deeply human book and I think shows Thomas on top form. I strongly recommend it.