Class Trip

An eerie and unsettling tale, packed with atmosphere and a dreadful foreboding. Delivered via the PoV of a child, this cleverly allows us to see things that he doesn't, even while using Nicholas' anxious and increasingly neurotic imagination to ramp up the tension. With sinister things just out of sight, this is a wonderful slice of modern gothic with a distinctive Gallic edge.

Emmanuel Carrère’s Class Trip was first published in French 1995 as La Classe de Neige. This new edition issued by Vintage uses the 1997 English translation by Linda Coverdale.

Although the novella is narrated in the third person, its viewpoint is that of Nicolas, a young boy in the early years of secondary school, who joins his classmates for a fortnight at a skiing resort. Nicolas is not exactly bullied, but it is clear from the first pages that he is considered as an outsider. We soon sense that this is largely the result of his parents’ over-protectiveness. Indeed, his father insists on driving him to the chalet despite its being three hundred miles away, rather than letting him board the bus hired by the school. Nicolas arrives late, already marked as the “weird” one, and is mortified even further when his father leaves with Nicolas’ luggage still in the car boot. Throughout the novel there are other clues that the relationships within his family are not entirely normal.

Nicolas has an over-active imagination, fuelled by his solitude and by his father’s penchant for telling nightmarish stories about kidnapped children and organ theft. For much of the novella he wallows in self-pity. The disappearance of a young boy gives him the opportunity to play the detective and achieve the popularity he craves. It’s hardly a spoiler to state that, in this, Nicolas will be disappointed although I will not state the how or why.

Class Trip has often been described as a horror novella. I’m not sure I agree, but the work does have enough elements in common with the genre to make this classification a reasonable one. Throughout there is a sense of morbidity, a feeling of dread which reaches a climax in the final pages. The work starts off as a coming-of-age novel but soon morphs into something much darker. What is particularly unsettling (and quite Gothic in approach) is that, throughout, the truth seems to be just out of our grasp. There is a constant interplay between fantasy and reality, wakefulness and sleep (or the lack thereof), truth and falsehood. Much is suggested, little is revealed. Class Trip is a chilling, yet understated, read.