Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

This debut novel by British writer Alice Chadwick covers a period of twenty-four hours—midnight to midnight—at a co-ed English private school in the aftermath of the death of one of its staff. The school is in a small village in the countryside, and many of its students are locals and thus day students.

The time is somewhere in the Thatcher era, that is to say the 1980s. The story follows a number of these local students who are in their middle years at the school, that is, in their mid-teens—young men and women suffering the anxieties and hormonal ups and downs that characterize that age. At the centre of the narrative are Thomasin (or “Tin” as everyone calls her), her friend Robin, and Jonah, a handsome boy who is in an on-again off-again relationship with Tin. Tin is a rebellious, backtalking, aloof, and self-absorbed person constantly at odds with just about everyone—students and teachers alike. After-school detention is no stranger to her. Tin and Robin have become estranged because Robin and Joshua are rumoured to have had sex at a party that starts off the book, a party Tin did not attend.

There is also Davey, a tall, solid rugby player from a farming family, and Miriam, who has conversations with her still-born twin, Miranda. Others go back and forth, dealing with domestic issues and the confusion around them. For this is adolescence: confusion above all.

The school’s staff figure in as well. They are dealing not just with the death of a colleague, but also the need to manage the different personalities in their classrooms. Not to mention an odd-ball headmaster who wanders about a bit directionlessly looking for students to discipline.

The day moves through class time, breaks, and the walks between school and home as students go home for lunch and leave the school at the end of the day. Chadwick’s distinctive style vividly captures the multiple levels of stress and anxiety experienced by adolescents as they labour under the weight of academics, seek peer approval, and try to cope with the expectations of their parents and teachers for their future. All that on top of the fluctuations of their hormones, with the need for love and sex dominating their thoughts day-in and day-out.

Theirs is an elite school, but it stands just across some playing fields from the local public high school, and there are hints of these students’ ongoing struggle with their educational alienation from those in that school, who, after all, are their neighbours.

But as the narrative progresses, each student begins to shake off some of their daily self-mindedness to think about the man who died. He had been a sort of guidance counsellor for them, and each had a different interaction with him, based on whatever difficulties they each were going through at the time. Their thoughts on this reflect the difficulty of emerging from an adolescent cocoon into the realities of adulthood.

Dark Like Under, published by Bibioasis, is a moving narrative that brings the reader deep into the emotions of young people getting a glimpse of adulthood.