I read this book for my book group. Or rather I tried. I came to it having just finished Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh. The extreme contrast did not help the experience. One book, a masterpiece borne out of a global conflict, the other an unfathomable enigma borne out of a scandal in a girl's school. One felt profound and insightful, the other experimental and confusing. Here it’s the psychological aftermath of the abuse rather than the thing itself, but still, you get to wear the been there done that t shirt. I found this a very difficult reading experience compared to the majority of novels I am drawn to. It was acerbic throughout and presented people, young and old, adults and children, men and women, in an unflattering light. Surely this doesn’t reflect the performing arts, both in their teaching, and in the sort of people drawn into this sphere?! At times the dialogue is so unrealistic and contrived, sort of how characters talk in plays, very self-aware and philosophical. But I think that's exactly what Catton was pointing out, the fact that people are always trying to create a self-image that reflects how they want to be seen.

a b Cochrane, Kira (7 September 2013). "Eleanor Catton: 'I'm strongly influenced by box-set TV drama. At last the novel has found its screen equivalent' ". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media . Retrieved 19 September 2013. Stanley has an affair with an underage student, Isolde ( Ella Edward). Isolde has a 15-year-old sister, Victoria ( Rachel Roberts), whose affair with her tennis coach George Saladin ( Erroll Shand), caused him to be accused of rape (whether violent or statutory is never clear). George becomes the object of a media scandal that continues to unfold throughout the film. Although there's potentially a lot to say about the role of acting during a public shame-fest, "The Rehearsal" never convincingly teases out the connections between this stuff and all the bits in the acting school—although there are tasty glimpses of a theater piece the students are working on; it feels like a drily funny send-up of the kinds of cliched pieces that theater students mount in response to news events they aren't sincerely interested in, except as raw material for their workshops. Nyff Announces Retrospective Selections Inspired By Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘My Journey Through French Cinema’ – Exclusive Although the UK now feels like home, she can’t resist returning to New Zealand in her fiction. Unlike so many writers, she is happy to talk about her next work, “a queasy immersion thriller” that will be called Doubtful Sound, after the remote fjord in the south-west of New Zealand where it is set. She has had the title for a long time – “I just think it is so beautiful” – but it was only in the final months of completing Birnam Wood that the story came to her.First-look image of Eva Green in BBC Two's The Luminaries". BBC Two. 21 March 2019. Archived from the original on 9 May 2020 . Retrieved 24 May 2020.

There is Stanley, auditioning for the Institute and then his experiences during his first year there. Like me when I was at school, Julia also possesses that fear of being thought creepy by other girls at the same time as feeling annoyed by many and attracted to a few. The book, though, does have some of the sort of generalisations about female group behaviour which I only ever hear of in fiction by women writers. (My school was a bit odd and devoid of all manner of things good and bad which other people I've since known experienced at school. Our year never really gelled, said the teachers, which may be the reason for certain absent social features. Plus the most of the women I'm good friends with in more than a basic social networking sense tend, like me, not to be fans of hanging out in big all-female groups.) But despite all the occasional things that for me missed the mark, The Rehearsal captures very well the suffocating experience of being a teenage girl in a single sex school when you just don't see most things the way the others do. It must be true that people often are what, on the surface, they seem to be; if it weren’t, algorithms wouldn’t have much use at all. There’s a certain pleasure in being a known type. At one point, Lemoine notes how “being a cliché can be very useful,” as it makes other people “think they’ve seen all there is to see.” Lady Darvish, musing on her marriage, thinks that her husband “took a certain pride in being so predictable . . . for the simple reason that he loved to see her demonstrate how well she understood him.” Phenomenal! Not only is this an amazing book, but it's Catton's debut, written during her year of getting her MFA...at the age of 22! Incredible.Eleanor Catton won the audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week, and she was awarded the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary . Catton was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship through which she attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has been published in a range of journals, and magazines, including Turbine, Sport and Granta. The story takes place between three neighboring groups of students. The Drama Institute is a drama college for aspiring actors, and the girls' high school, Abbey Grange, is an elite private school. The music school rounds out the settings of this novel. The sax teacher, a female of unknown identity, is often seen in shadow or startling light. Speaking of identity, only first or last names are identified, all except for one replacement teacher, Jean Critchley, who came on board when music teacher Mr. Saladin was let go. He had a scandalous affair with Victoria, one of the girls from Abbey Grange. This affair is the centerpiece story, from which all other stories, themes, and actions unfold. The abbreviated names personify the characters and their motivations in shadow for much of the story. Catton met Chicago-born poet Steven Toussaint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Toussaint moved to New Zealand in 2011 to begin a PhD in US avant-garde poetry at Victoria University of Wellington. [6] [37] The couple later lived in Mount Eden with their two cats (Laura Palmer and Isis) while Catton taught creative writing part-time at the Manukau Institute of Technology. [6] [19] Catton describes Toussaint as the first reader of her drafts, and he prevailed in an argument over whether one character in The Luminaries should be killed off. [37] They married on 3 January 2016. [37] [38] [39] [40] As of 2023 [update] the couple live in Cambridge, England with their daughter. [26] Philanthropy [ edit ] Other figures one might imagine to be significant, such as Victoria and Isolde's parents, remain largely off-scene, too (only Stanley's father repeatedly pops up in awkward father-son meetings), while for example the adult figures at the acting school are known simply by their titles -- Head of Acting, Head of Movement. There is so much to enjoy and admire in this book: a razor-sharp sense of her characters' self-love; a wonderful ear for the rhythms of language, both everyday and heightened; a generous apprehension of the power and processes of theatre and music; a fond comedy of the ridiculousness of teachers (especially the "hopping and red-faced and puffing" Miss Clark, demonstrating the flexibility of condoms by stretching one over her sensible shoe). And, of course, dazzling authorial control. It's astounding that The Rehearsal was written by a 22-year-old, though fitting that this talented young writer should evoke so well the charged emotional landscape before adult compromise, when a girl's ambition and desire are not yet "circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt"; when it feels as though anything is possible.

The same intriguing, undoing kind of writing works on the world of the book, too; its setting and details. So we may read and read about the weather, about the interiors of rooms, the costumes people wear, the food on their plates, the New Zealand riverbank and mists and waters, the sound of its rain hammering on a tin roof … Yet these details don't come together to be compressed into a reality we care about and inhabit. If the book has been made as a kind of stage, then these are the stage sets – not real to look at, only made of paper and glue. In the end, Catton's wondrous 19th-century New Zealand and its rivers of gold may as well be as far away from us as the colony would have been once to a British reader. Out of sight, out of mind. She writes about being a teenage boy more touchingly than any ex-teenage boy (for them, apparently, life was mostly about The Penis. For me, as for Catton's young man, life was about substantially more important things, as well as learning to cope with aforementioned Penis). We hear little from the 31 year old teacher, so we can’t determine whether he is a latter-day Humbert Humbert. The Rehearsal could be understood as theatre-fiction, which, as Graham Wolfe explains, refers to "novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre as artistic practice and industry". [3] The novel describes theatrical technique in great detail and uses what Catton calls "themes of performance and performativity". [4] Critical reaction [ edit ] Much like the moment in pool when the cue ball breaks up the carefully assembled triangle, this encounter between Mira and Lemoine ends up affecting every other character in the book, even those who have no reason to know one another. The choices they make, to use and to be used, reverberate in ways you might expect only if the image of the five crushed landslide victims lingers as you read. All of the book’s major players get a chance to turn the tide of events in their favor. Shelley Noakes, Mira’s best friend and roommate, is stealthily seeking a way out of the collective, tired of playing the steady foil to her more volatile friend. The Darvishes—Sir Owen and his wife, Lady Darvish—view Lemoine’s incredible wealth with a mixture of disgust, awe, and desire, even as they conduct business with him. And, finally, there’s Tony Gallo, Rosie’s love interest, Mira’s ex- something, and a former member of Birnam Wood, who, in a paroxysm of barely sublimated sexual jealousy, has decided to write an exposé of Lemoine, and in so doing stumbles upon Lemoine’s mining operation.

The Rehearsal

a b c d Masters, Tim (15 October 2013). "Man Booker Prize: Eleanor Catton becomes youngest winner with The Luminaries". BBC News . Retrieved 15 October 2013.

We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering.Catton’s writing is remarkably assured. The cleverness of the concept and structure -- which could otherwise have risked archness -- is balanced by the characters’ intensity of emotion. Part of the pleasure of reading The Rehearsal is the feeling of anticipation Catton ascribes to all theatre audiences: waiting for something to go wrong, for the illusion to be spoiled. At times, changes of tone, posture or stage lighting are described, so that the reader is both absorbed in the story and constantly aware of the effects of performance. Yet the novel’s real achievement is in its creation of a self-sustaining world." - Lidija Haas, Times Literary Supplement Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think of making you see. While I haven't yet read "The Luminaries", Catton's second novel, I strongly recommend that you read this exemplary novel first. Witness her emergence before you become engrossed with what she has since become. He befriends Isolde -- but since he is technically adult and Isolde below the age of consent their relationship puts him in a difficult position.