School of Night

by Alan Wall

Book Overview

Sean Tallow has only two overriding desires in life. One is to step into the shoes of his glamorous friend Daniel Pagett, and the other is to establish the truth about the School of Night, a shadowy group of Elizabethans who clustered around Sir Walter Ralegh. Tallow pursues the School of Night and its entanglement in the question of whether the man from Stratford-on-Avon could really have written the plays ascribed to William Shakespeare. If he didn't,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031228778X
• ISBN13: 9780312287788
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 293 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Bardolator's Delight

Alan Wall has transformed his obvious reverence for Shakespeare and his equally obvious obsession with the "authorial question"--which fascinates legions of the plays' devotees and elicits weary yawns from the rest, who believe the matter prima facie beyond question--into a quirkily absorbing detective story. Indeed, with a bit of clever marketing, The School of Night might give Shakespeare's doubters, or at least enthusiasts of Marlovian authorship, the same kind of rhetorical boost Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time gave to the Ricardians (who maintain crookback Richard III was really all sweetness and light and view Shakespeare's play as based wholly on Tudor propaganda and misinformation). Wall is a subtle writer who moves adeptly, and with economic efficiency, in simultaneously odd, interesting, learned, and tidily interreleated directions. This is literary writing, filled with symbology, scholarly allusion, and deft metaphor, but all in the most unobtrusive and graceful manner. Moreover, books of this sort must be in good part tutorial, and Wall has done his homework. At appropriate moments, he feeds us the essential elements of the authorial controversy, introduces the various contenders to the throne, and ultimately settles on Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's great contemporary, as the alter-Bard. The novel then unfolds as narrator Sean Tallow seeks to decipher the secret of "The School of Night," which is at once an obscure reference from the early comedy Love's Labour Lost and, perhaps, a secret society to which Marlowe may have belonged. Principal characters are closely observed and artfully developed. Bibliomaniacs of all stripes will recognize and root for the introspective antiquarian Sean Tallow and his quest, but the parallel story of Tallow's relationship to a boyhood friend and his increasingly complex--and shady--life does more than allow Wall to space out his revelations. Both stories move in surprising directions, interact nicely, and wend their ways to what I found to be a satisfying conclusion. Moreover, it is a conclusion, even a moral, that I surmise the Bard--whoever he was--would wholeheartedly endorse. In short, a very rich, very entertaining, very instructive novel, filled with character, imagery, insight, and narrative tension--not exactly sound and fury, but certainly signifying at the very least an exciting writer whose books I'll eagerly search out.

A light book in weight but not impact

It's amazing that a book as light as this in pages can cover so much. Wall's writing is truly skillful. I thought when picking it up that it would be almost a 'Masterpiece Theater' costume drama. Instead,I found that narrator Sean Tallow's diving into the past into the question of Shakepeare's authorship and the mysteries regarding the School of Night to be subordinate to Sean's present-day activities and state of mind. Sean is haunted on two levels; one with his family life consisting of thief dad and dead mother, and his own un-self-confident and introverted nature, and secondly about the theme of whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare. The funny thing about the present-day is it is so timeless in this book; the book has very few material accoutrements and I found myself going for pages wondering what year the book was really reflecting (there are but few clues - fleeting references to AIDs, blue plastic, and mobile phones finally narrowed it down). So much is about thought and perceptions and themes that are ageless - idolatry, betrayal, love, and especially knowledge pursuit. Sean pretty much covers what this book is all about when he says "...I was glad that I never learnt to drive, no longer embarrassed by it. After all, noone has ever unthreaded time's labyrinth like this from the inside of a car. You must touch the holy tracks for yourself. The truest pilgrims even take off their shoes and kiss the ground until their lips, along with the soles of their feet, start to bleed." This book makes palpable the experiences of the dead and how tangible is the quest for this knowledge.

An intelligent novel by a skilled artist

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. . . .The hue of dungeous, and the School of Night. --William Shakespeare On this book's dust jacket there is a remarkable blurb by the novelist, poet, and essayist Anne Stevenson: "After reading The School of Night, I don't think there's a better English prose writer living." The School of Night, however, is not for everyone. Its appeal is to thoughtful readers who appreciate the finer points of metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, and literary criticism. Basically the plot of this novel centers on two men, Sean Tallow and Daniel Pagett, who, although greatly different in temperament, form a bond of friendship that endures until they are separated by death. A realist and pragmatist, Dan greedily pursuing tangible realities. He devotes his energies to the accumulation of wealth and properties, and the cavalier practice of hedonism. Sean, the protagonist and narrator of the tale, is an idealistic dreamer. Obsessed with a burning desire to comprehend the past, he devotes himself to unravelling the secrets of "the School of Night," a 16th-century society devoted to the Faustian pursuit of knowledge. In his relentless obsession with the thirty years of English history between 1590 and 1620, Sean discovers the School of Night to be "a group of dark and fearless intelligences, exploring with skepticism everything previously deemed unapproachable in any mode other than venerable credulity. ... Because no text was too sacred for their savage inquisition, they set themselves to gaze anew upon the world and its beliefs. Traditions were mere confusions in which superstitious men unnecessarily enmeshed themselves and reverence was no more and no less than fear of true knowledge." At the heart of Sean's quest is the conundrum of Shakespearean authorship. Who actually wrote the plays attributed to the man from Stratford-on-Avon? After two decades of intensive study, Sean comes to a surprising conclusion. The School of Night opens with these words: "Five days ago I stole the Hariot Notebooks," and it closes with a felony even more serious. The biblical saying, "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" is given a new and shattering twist. Along the way, Wall tosses out bon mots such as, "If you want to hear God laughing just tell him your plans for the future." Although the author throws in some steamy erotic scenes for hoi polloi, his work is slanted toward "high-brow" readers. The School of Night is a intelligent work of fiction by a skilled artist. Alan Wall was born in Yokshire and educated at Oxford. His previous works include Jacob, Curved Light, Chronicle, Bless the Thief, Lenses, A to Z, Silent Conversations, and Richard Dadd in Bedlam & Other Stories.

Full of symbols, surprises, and intrigue.

Wall constantly intrigues and intellectually challenges the reader with two parallel stories, set 450 years apart. Sean Tallow is a 42-year-old Oxford graduate and the son of a thief, a man who says in the opening sentence that he has just stolen the Hariot notebooks from the university library. He is consumed with his mission to find out all he can about the School of Night, a mysterious group which involved Sir Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe, Hariot, and others, and to which there is only one reference in literature, in Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost. Sean thinks that the encoded messages in Hariot's notebooks will help him discover the answer to whether Shakespeare really wrote all the plays attributed to him. At the same time, he is deeply involved in trying to help the family of the recently deceased Dan Pagett, his oldest friend, a man who became immensely wealthy through his mercantile interests. Dan was always very much centered in the here and now, a person dealing with earthly concerns and day to day existence. Sean, by contrast, has always been centered on the long ago, a person dealing with mysteries and intellectual concerns, a night person working the overnight desk at the BBC. Even the most dedicated symbol-hunter will be kept fully occupied poring over this fascinating novel, as dozens of references to the night, both obvious and subtle, appear throughout both stories. Water, one of the metaphysical elements most closely associated with night, is also a major focus. Sean and Dan become friends while fishing along the river; Sean says at the beginning of the novel, "I never tried to push against the river"; Ralegh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, along the river; and Dan's house is on the river. The satisfying conclusion brings all these references together. Crisp, concise imagery combines with diverse intellectual discussions of alchemy, the "truth" of history vs. the "tissue" of probability, Freudian vs. Jungian analysis, linear interpretations of Elizabethan literature, and even the introduction of the zero during Elizabethan history. Yet the novel wears this intellectualism lightly. Wall never forgets that this is, first and foremost, a novel, not a dissertation. As such it is one of the most tightly organized novels I've read in recent years, a never-ending source of surprises and intrigue. Mary Whipple