Friendly Fire: Some Things You Can't Learn at School

He's writing about a bunch of misfits at boarding school during the 70's but life here is more 'Mallory Towers' than 'Another Country' or 'If'. The main problem is the protagonist Sophie, through who the story is told. Perhaps she should be called 'Patrick', because this reader never fully believes that the perspective is that of a 13-year-old girl who's grown up in a care home (the language/observation is that of a 40-year-old gay man - sorry!). Would a 13-year-old really uses terms like 'Tudorbethan' to describe the design of a house or would she recognise that a teenage boy's aftershave is Eau Sauvage? I doubt it. What's more there's no character development to show that Sophie is the kind of girl who knows these things.

At one stage Sophie is invited to become a member of the school's exclusive society of bellringers, which is apparently akin to being part of a 'licenced hellfire club'. This is exactly the problem with the book, PG tells us this but he never shows us any evidence that it really is! As someone who's been to the type of school he's writing about I can assure anyone that most teenage boys or girls would prefer double detention that to have to ring bells in their spare time. It just doesn't ring true (excuse the pun)... plus it's a narrative red-herring which again is a common feature in this novel. I know Patrick is under a lot of pressure to bring out a novel on almost a yearly basis, but a bit more time and effort could have made this one a cracker ...


Awake My Soul   June 28, 2005
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

It's not surprising that Gale, brought up in prisons and public schools, should return from time to time to tales of institutional life. What is surprising is the freshness of perspective he manages to find in each reworking of a familiar milieu.

Themes recur as well as places: the outsider as the reference point for sanity (and often morality) and the use of a central character who is in some way freakish: Sophie, our protagonist here, has a bizarrely parent-less and yet multi-parented life and is reminiscent of Dido from A Sweet Obscurity in that though a child, she has a certain grave maturity which affects the lives of the adults around her.

These outsiders' stories may or may not carry some metaphorical representation of Gale's experiences as a gay man but what is fascinating is his ability to find the dystopic in the 'normal' and set it against the surer groundings which the freaks have managed to dredge out of their less-than-fortunate circumstances.

I've just read Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' and there are interesting comparisons: Ishiguro's narrative is also set in a boarding school, also focuses on the interplay between apparently unusual children and the adult world around them. But Gale's story is the subtler of the two in that he does the whole job with character, rather than needing to invent a sinister parallel reality in order to provide the metaphorical underpinnings for outsider-hood.

I noted in a previous review that Gale is often compared to Joanna Trollope and Iris Murdoch. In Friendly Fire, we get a good taste of Dickens too: When Dr Harestock announces the morning hymn he 'never treated the first line as a title but read until the first full stop.' In Great Expectations, Mr. Wopsle's announcements of the psalm always involve his 'giving the whole first verse.'

Dickensian too are the wonderful illustrations by Aidan Hicks: not only are they lovely in their own right, but they can also be used by the eagle-eyed as a way of foretelling the action as each chapter begins.

You get a lot with Gale: he's clearly read everything good in English Literature and knows how to play the magpie with it. But he is never less than original even in this, his thirteenth novel. I can't think of an intelligent person I know who could fail to enjoy it and to appreciate its subtle, lingering charm.


Well-constructed and sympathetic novel   May 31, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Lots of interesting detail about Winchester College. Hard to believe that Sophie would have been so unrebellious, that punk could have so little impact on these kids, that a low-class girl like Sophie could be so at ease with all the members of the upper classes that she comes into contact with.

The characters, Charlie, Lucas and Mr Compton are drawn much more convincingly than the straight ones - Sophie, Wilf and Margaret.

Overall an enjoyable read but not the definitive seventies school novel.