Oligarchy: A Novel
Scarlett Thomas, 2019 (2020, U.S.)
Counterpoint Press
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781640093065
Summary
It’s already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school.
She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school’s unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst.
The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits—featuring a hypnotizing black diamond—hang everywhere and whose ghost is said to haunt the dorms. It’s said that she fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake.
But the girls don’t really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about one another. When Tash’s friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the routines of the school seem darker and more alien than ever before.
Tash must try to stay alive—and sane—while she uncovers what’s really going on.
Hilariously dark, Oligarchy is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the digital age, exploring youth, power, and privilege. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of privileged teenage girls, in all their triviality and magnitude, seeking acceptance and control in a manipulative world.
(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Hammersmith, England, UK
• Education—Chelmsford College; University of East London
• Awards—Elle Style Award-Best Young Writer;
• Currently—teachers at University of Kent
Scarlett Thomas is the British author of some 10+ novels, including PopCo (2005), The End of Mr. Y (2006), and Our Tragic Universe (2011), and Oligarchy (2019). She teaches English literature at the University of Kent.
She is the daughter of Francesca Ashurst, and attended a variety of schools, including a state junior school in Barking, and a boarding school for eighteen months. She studied for her A levels at Chelmsford College and achieved a First in a degree in Cultural Studies at the University of East London from 1992-1995.
Her first three novels feature Lily Pascale, an English literature lecturer who solves murder mysteries. Each of the succeeding novels is independent of the others.
In 2008 she was a member of the Edinburgh International Film Festival jury, along with Director Iain Softley and presided over by actor Danny Huston.
She has taught English Literature at the University of Kent since 2004, and has previously taught at Dartmouth Community College, South East Essex College and the University of East London. She reviews books for the Literary Review, Independent on Sunday, and Scotland on Sunday.
Thomas shares with Ariel, her protagonist in The End of Mr. Y, a wish to know everything:
I'm very much someone who wants to work out the answers. I want to know what's outside the universe, what's at the end of time, and is there a God? But I think fiction's great for that--it's very close to philosophy.
In 2001 she was named by the Independent as one of 20 Best Young Writers.
In 2002 she won Best New Writer in the Elle Style Awards, and also featured as an author in New Puritans, a project led by the novelists Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoeconsisting of both a manifesto and an anthology of short stories. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
One of the funniest novels in recent years…. It takes a special kind of audacity to write a comic novel about teenagers with eating disorders, but Thomas’s humor has a sharp, rhythmic perfection. Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic without sinking into the tedium of real-life conversation…. Oligarchy is a study in obsessiveness pinned to a vague, whodunit structure we don’t really need, with a couple of barely felt deaths thrown in. But in Thomas’s hands we don’t care…. Intriguing, fluid and frequently funny interior monologues are what Thomas does best.
Lydia Millet - New York Times Book Review
[A] British writer who excels at delivering novels about difficult subjects, turns her brilliant, incisive gaze to a boarding school.… It’s a bracing reminder that no matter how obsessively young people measure themselves against one another, their self-worth also comes from the grown-ups around them… a strange but urgent glimpse into society’s often conflicting expectations of girls.
Bethanne Patrick - Washington Post
Thomas executes it brilliantly…. It's Thomas' boldness, as well as her writing―every sentence seems painstakingly constructed―that make Oligarchy such a remarkable novel. It's brash, bizarre and original, an unflinching look at a group of young women who have become "hungry ghosts, flickering on the edge of this world."
Michael Schaub - NPR
[A] fast, fizzy read… Thomas is satirically attuned to the intricate frustration of teen life, the ignoble obsessions of puerile minds and the speed at which hygiene, decorum and false pretences vanish in a single-sex boarding institution. This makes for an entertaining, irreverent and wrong-hilarious read… The novel is full of brilliant lines.… [Thomas] is on a red-hot streak of invention right now and these narratives succeed because of the novelist’s deep understanding of the cracks and quirks of such communities…. Despite the occasional spangles of darkness, this is hugely enjoyable. It’s about as menacing as a cool girl’s black glitter nail polish—and just as much fun.
Guardian (UK)
In this delicious Gothic set in a British boarding school, the daughter of a massively rich Russian finds herself menaced equally by Instagram, an anorexia epidemic, and a spectral ancestor whose haunting portraits seem to watch her every move.
Oprah Magazine
Thomas has a perfectly pitched ear for human cruelty and self-delusion… and all the wild tortures young girls subject themselves to just to feel pretty in the world.
Entertainment Weekly
[S]atisfying, keenly observed…. Though Thomas’s characters get a lot of flak for being insufferable rich girls from outsiders in the novel—and they are—she’s captured with an empathetic eye all the brutal, visceral, and surprisingly funny aspects of teenage girlhood. This is a sharp, astute novel.
Publishers Weekly
Thomas has penned a sharp-eyed novel about the pressure society, adults, and peers put on girls to look and behave a certain way…. Thomas deftly explores exactly what those cost are, and the toll they take on young women.
Booklist
(Starred review) Thomas does a fantastic job of capturing the mental and verbal style of a contemporary teen…. This is a weird, twisty book… [with] the kind of dark humor that is only possible from a writer of profound compassion. Strong stuff. Another strange delight from one of the United Kingdom's most interesting authors.
Kirkus Reviews
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