A sultry debut novel for our sizzling summer, Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan is an absorbing story of alienation, longing and the search for self. Set in England, during the famously long, hot summer of 1976, it tells of Jean, a 17-year-old scholarship boy at a bohemian boarding school for challenging boys. An angry and solitary soul, Jean feels ill at ease and unwelcome in this monied environment. As exams loom and Jean trembles on the brink of an uncertain future, Dunnigan takes us into his mind, past and present, and his growing attraction to a boy named Tom, sportsman, temptation and catalyst.
Compton Manor School is an imposing 17th century estate. Later modified by a wealthy ‘bachelor dandy’, it’s an eyebrow-raising combination of green leather smoking room and billiards lounge, Tuscan arches and Japanese sand garden. Staffed by the kind of flared-trousered teacher who waxes lyrical about ‘the colours of LSD, the smell of poppy-seed tea and the bitter, earthy taste of magic mushrooms’, it projects a determinedly nonconformist image, such as drumming processions for the summer solstice, and sending boys on solo hiking trips (here they are encouraged to lie awake in the dark ‘reflecting on all that has been and all that is yet to come’).
For Jean, a West London kid, previously to be found hanging out in Westbourne Grove and listening to early punk, Compton Manor is alien territory. Feeling like an outsider he observes the alpha boys from a distance. He’s noticed handsome Tom, in return Tom has noticed Jean’s penchant for cannabis. They bond by the local lake, Tom teaches Jean to fish, Jean shows Tom how to roll a joint, and one night, under a new moon the inevitable happens, ‘And there is the sound of Tom’s breath and the calls of the crickets’.
There is great nuance in Dunnigan’s coming-of-age tale. Ostensibly about intense first love, it also examines the notions of masculinity of its day. When we first meet Jean, he is damaged, only able to show his pain through violence (his mother, Rosa, sending him to Compton Manor after a string of incidents, including smashing every glass item at home, setting a barn on fire and jabbing a compass into a boy’s face). Slowly his past is revealed, an absent father, a disturbing formative relationship. And here, at Compton Manor, despite the school’s hippyish values, underneath it’s the same old boarding school vibes. Bullying, homophobia and anti-semitism are rife and even some of the teachers are alarmingly dysfunctional.
Jean’s potential salvation lies in his sense of self-reliance and escape, manifested through the practice of meditation, where he focuses on air becoming breath, leaving the ‘heavy, dense’ things of his life behind.
‘In this non-place of existence, Jean or non-Jean hovers. He is a current in the air, a single bright ray, a soft murmur’
As his story unfolds and Jean is forced to face some painful truths, this may prove to be an essential gift.
A memorable debut from a writer to watch, the novel’s beautiful and affecting denouement resonates long after the final page.
Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan is published by Daunt Books, 256 pages.
