North

Description

It exposes the lives of six people who attend a school in Oxford either as student or teacher. The narrator of the story, a middle-aged man of means, is almost as enigmatic as his subject, North, a strange, elegant, charismatic Anglo-American youth. The handsome, precocious North begins a three-way relationship between himself, a beautiful 27 year-old woman teacher, and a young married, but bisexual, head of Physics who is good-looking, athletic and evangelically Christian. As the novel proceeds in various settings, Oxford, London, Ravello, Washington DC, a confidential intimacy evolves between the narrator and North and the suspense mounts as North reveals his plans for systematic seduction. The players in the game of love become entangled in sexual anarchy that accelerates the novel towards its decisive, cataclysmic climax. At the end there is an abiding mystery and an acute sense of potent evil. The reader is left wondering if there have been certain moral imperatives that have made the narrator tell less than the whole truth.

Brian Martin closely rivals Mary Wesley in that he is publishing his first novel at the age of 68. Previously he has written and edited academic books. His main career has been teaching literature for 40 years both at school in Oxford and at Oxford University. He has reviewed contemporary novels for more than thirty years for the national press, including the Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times and the Literary Review. He was appointed MBE for services to English literature.