Page 45 Review by Stephen
How much fun were YOUR school days?!
Did friendships dominate your day, punctuated perhaps by petty rivalries and the odd eruption of outright bullying? What do you remember: the indoors or the outdoors, your studies or the stoopid, the school hours or their afterhours? Were you a soccer star, class clown, academic demon? Or did you curl up into an armadillo-tight ball until the whole sorry saga was over? Do you remember that utter lack of agency, not least 'cause you were always skint?
Did you come away with unresolved questions that still linger long in your mind?
Rainey whisks you away to his own indigo, rust and cream-coloured school days, and they were very far from dull. Friendships full of generosity, but also fights, lots of feeling thwarted, a ball game of their own devising, music, drama, family gravity and a singularly sadistic, brutal, spital-spitting teacher. It's terrific - I was engrossed. - but that's by no means all this is.
Because the first 20 and last 60 pages hit you in stark black and white, and both sections tell a decidely different story. In fact, the opening episodes don't appear to be written or drawn by Paul Rainey at all, but by one Nick Goddard, a fellow ex-pupil of the very same school. They're from a scurrilous school mag called Crud which Paul remembers well... and some are very dark indeed.
And when Paul re-encounters the sadistic teacher, bed-ridden at a nursing home where he's giving a talk following the soaraway success of his last graphic novel (former Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME?), the old man recalls some pretty doings on the part of the school staff as dark as any of those in Crud. In fact, some of them are strikingly similar...
Haha! You'll have to make your own minds up! And I've deliberately left almost everything of real import for you to discover yourself, whilst hopefully loading the above so unevenly that you haven't a clue what's true and what's tosh. No more do I.
There's loads I'm still coming back to here on a second reading, and I'm fairly sure there'll be a third. If that doesn't say 'recommended', I don't know what does.
The publisher writes:
"A memoir of British middle school bullying and one precocious comic nerd’s fight to make it through while remaining as invisible as possible.Paul B. Rainey takes a look back at his middle school education and the indignities suffered—a mix of stalled friendships, pitched battles with martinets, and exasperated pleading with intractable parents.
Playground games take on outsized importance as Paul and his friends seek respite from a particularly abusive science teacher. Paul jockeys to hold his place in the complicated hierarchy of school bullying. Rainey takes a classic “school daze” tale—both wistful and hilarious—and manages to turn it on its head with a couple of his now famous twists. Find out the truth behind The Murder School and the effect it’s had on Rainey well into middle-age."
