The Rehearsal

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. This is not a book I would have chosen to read but the blurb made it look interesting. A scandal involving a pupil and a teacher rocks a high school somewhere in America. In fact a whole community is rocked by it and a local drama college decides to turn it into a play. Sounds OK - reminiscent maybe of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal about which I had somewhat mixed feelings.

As I have to write a review of it I've been forced to persevere with reading it and have managed just over 100 pages so far. It is improving but I'm beginning to think it should have come in loose leaf format so that you could throw it up in the air and read it at random. It dots around in time and space, people seem to say exactly what they're thinking, incidents are described and re-described from the point of view of each protagonist , there's a very strange saxophone teacher keeps cropping up just when you think she's disappeared for good and well I'm not sure where the plot is but it doesn't seem to be contained in anything I've read so far. But even after all that it does have something indefinable about it even though the sentence structure is sometimes eccentric and makes me cringe.

Perhaps I can, with a concerted effort, finish it over the next couple of days and move onto something more interesting.