NO sex, no drugs, no inner city deprivation or descriptions of social breakdown. This autobiographical first novel possesses a charmingly old fashioned quality, as though the Irvine Welsh school of literature had never come into existence.
It's not just the fact that Home sick so clearly draws on the author's own experience, but equally the world from which becomes is so sheltered and small. More readers, one imagines, are likely to be familiar with the heroin addicts of Trainspotting than the enclosed English preparatory school world described by Hanania.
Homesick is set during the early 1970s but, aside from a handful of references to popular music, there appears to be no major difference between this environment and the boarding schools featured in, for example, Robert Liddell's books of more than half a century earlier.
Young boys still have their own private language and archaic rituals such as "bog washing", an initiation rite whereby the victim's head is held down a lavatory bowl while the cistern is flushed. Hanania is perhaps tougher than his predecessors in writing about prep school life, less liable to adopt a roseate view and more inclined to dwell on the privations.
He is particularly good on the sense of displacement and confusion felt by any small child dropped, almost without explanation, into totally alien circumstances where everyone else seems to understand the unofficial but rigidly applied rules perfectly.
The removal from comfort of family surroundings to dormitory existence where all privacy is relinquished happens so rapidly that the initial response must be bafflement, closely followed by resentment against those responsible for what has happened.
Hanania's Lebanese alter ego in the novel knows that the best way to deal with this rapid and disagreeable change is to stay as quiet as possible, in the hope that it will prove to have been a mistake. Naturally, this is not the case and Homesick dwells on the gradual dawning of awareness, common to all boys in such schools, that there is no escape.
He gives much attention, too, to the intensely hierarchical nature of boarding school society, in which certain individuals hold sway over their fellow pupils with the tacit acquiescence of teachers supposedly in charge.
So dormitory life (far more important than any time spent in the classroom) is dominated by a kind of well bred but ruthless gang war fare between various factions. Boys who are perceived to be in any way different from the established norm find themselves derided. Social acceptance assumes staggering importance, and personal possessions, even of the most intimate nature, are treated as public property.
This bizarre little world, often far more odd than anything experienced later in life, is covered in detail by Hanania, who juxtaposes scenes in his fictional but all too real prep school with descriptions of life in Beirut as civil war gradually descends on the city.
However, although he clearly knows Lebanon as well as English boarding schools, the former somehow makes less of an impact on the reader, leaving a sense of being rather forced. Beirut was Hanania's home town but it is England with all its class ridden obsessions which obviously holds more allure for him now. If he is homesick, it is less for the Lebanon of his youth than for prep school.
The novel is topped and tailed by the narrator nostalgically returning, not to Beirut, but to the scenes of his displacement. In Enemies of Promise, published in the late 1930s, Cyril Connolly wrote that some men never recover from their experiences at boarding school, forever haunted by the successes and failures experienced there, after which everything else feels pallid and second rate. Homesick confirms that the powerful authority of England's schools remains undimmed.
