The New Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There’s a moment in this book, relatively early on, where Joey is advised to rub butter on a bruise and it is a moment which fascinates me to this day. Would the butter have to be salted or unsalted? How much of the butter would suffice? Is this really a thing or is it Elinor M. Brent-Dyer having one of her hallucinations? A part of me wants to google whether this is true medical science, and yet an equal part of me doesn’t want to find out.
And so we come to The New Chalet School, a book that is legendary to me for the quality of its small details; a book so full and rich of minutiae that it’s almost not a children’s book at all, but rather something that feels almost like reportage. It’s too real, at this point, this series to me, it is a book that is so thoroughly real that reading this, and the resolution of one of the key sub plots, is almost painful. It’s perhaps one of the few moments in the series where Brent-Dyer delivers a lesson on morality and behaviour that is hard; truly hard, to read, and coming after a sequence defined by happenstance and pratfalls, feels even harder. It’s horrible, really how the subplot is resolved, and I think it’s one of the few moments where Brent-Dyer becomes a hard, and almost cruel author.
(A sidebar: Happenstance and Pratfalls will be my new band name)
But; coupled with that, as ever, is a novel full of glory, and it’s so hard to digest, these wild shifts of tone and style. Brent-Dyer handles the girl’s slow realisation that Mademoiselle is not going to get well with a warm, light and kind hand and again, in contrast, I return to that subplot and the way it’s wrapped up and the hard, hard tones in which it is delivered. A novel of contrasts; the New Chalet School, and yet one I love. I do, despite it all, I do. I don’t think I can’t.
A hard, complicated book to resolve, and I don’t think these are words that I easily associate with the Chalet School. But – here, I do, and this book is fascinating to me and rather important because of that. But. Yes. A review of stutters this, and of contrasts, and of an author who is so very good and somewhat terrifying, somehow, with the skill she has.
Daisy May Johnson 
It is a lot of years since I read New so it took me a couple of minutes to remember the incident in question. Yes, horrible, and badly handled by Jem if I recall correctly? Must reread…
That’s the incident, yes!
Isn’t there some discussion over whether one of the children will attend the school? I really must dig out my copy when I get home…
Yeah, they pop up again in a later novel but I *think* that’s the last of them?
The callousness of Jem’s response always shocks me. Surely he knew the damage he could have done probably did do to a child! But then he treated Sybil abominably too.
Oh, that’s an intriguing reminder about Sybil! And yes, I do think Jem is incredibly callous in this instance.
I always felt desperately sorry for Sybil. Spending her childhood being blamed for a childhood accident when she was very small (her actions were quite logical if wrong – did any of the adults take any of the blame?), and then being told she was going to Australia with her mother and not the school of needlework she had been dreaming about and working towards for years. I hadn’t realised I was still so cross about this!
Apologies for bringing this up! 😉 (But seriously, this is a fascinating thread, I appreciate it greatly!)
I’m always angry that no one ever suggests that actually the adults were in the wrong because none of the children were adequately supervised. Poor Sybil I’ve always hoped the Australian husband taught her she was worth something.
butter on a bruise is an old remedy, my grandmother used to do it. No idea why although this says it works http://ucanmedic.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/butter-on-bruise.html personally I have my doubts!
Oh how intriguing! 🙂