In a characteristically thought-provoking conversation between a lecturer and student in Kate Weinberg’s debut novel The Truants, the writer Agatha Christie is summarised: “Private, reserved, a triumph of the rational – like the books she wrote, in which mysteries are only puzzles to be solved, all chaos neatly tidied up at the end, the murderer brought to account.”
This description of Christie later gets disproved, one of many interesting intertextual strains in The Truants. Weinberg herself has an aversion to neat endings, or neatness in general – her plot takes surprising turns, her characters are multifaceted, and their dialogue pings with curious anecdotes and diversions that, unusually, add rather than detract from the whole.
Set in a vividly rendered university in Norwich (Weinberg did the masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia), the book is narrated by freshman Jess Walker. Although she’s young and new to the college, Jess is no ingenue. She holds her own with her beautiful, popular flatmate Georgie. She’s able to put men and boys in their place. She is not preoccupied with her own flaws and instead notices things about the world around her. She is, in fact, sleuth-like in her ability to size up people and situations.
This intelligence marks her out to be mentored by her esteemed lecturer and celebrated writer Lorna Clay. The relationship between the pair recalls novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or more recently Sarah Henstra’s vibrant debut The Red Word. Weinberg makes the mentor-student dynamic her own, though, mixing it with an engaging plot centred around love, betrayal and murder.
Unforgettable introduction
Other contemporary touchstones include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Barbara Bourland’s new novel Fake Like Me, both of which have young, smart female narrators with plenty to say about class, gender and identity. Sex, too, plays a large part in The Truants, and Weinberg writes it well. Out for a run one afternoon, Jess comes across a hearse in the middle of a wood with a couple having sex in the back. It is her (and the reader’s) unforgettable introduction to the troubled South African journalist Alec, an enigmatic character who has relationships with many of the pivotal characters in the book.
After failing to break the news of a massacre in his hometown, Alec has left Johannesburg to study at Norwich. Both his personal history and the political history of South Africa are compelling tales in their own right. Jess soon finds herself caught somewhere between obsession and love: "So this is desire. The feeling of currents flowing through your body, switching on all the circuits until every pore is prickling with life. This feeling: I want to f**king eat him."
From London, Weinberg studied English at Oxford before her masters. She has worked as a slush pile reader, a bookshop assistant, a journalist and a ghost writer. The Truants marks her out as a natural storyteller – in the vein of Christie herself – who spins a decent yarn with lots of smaller yarns along the way. At times we’re bombarded with information and the plot momentum can be ferocious. Jess’s actions have immediate consequences and she is quick to follow her instincts and chase them down to various locations. Sometimes this lacks plausibility. A moving and realistic abortion scene, for example, gets muddied with a funeral, a trip to Italy, and Jess’s need to solve crimes. The final few chapters of the book are also too dragged out, with the plot mostly sewn up and the most engaging characters off-stage.
Startling
It is to Weinberg’s credit that the above doesn’t take away from the book. Her prose is fluid, at times startling, and her insights into society and human behaviour sharp. She knows the difference between drama and tension, and frequently underplays scenes and back story. One standout example is Lorna’s history with her father, who idolised her as a child, before she grew up and out of his control. On the night she’s out celebrating her admission to Cambridge, she comes home to an attack: “One of the hardest things about it is that nothing very material happened. He didn’t stick his hand down my knickers, or even really hurt me. But he broke my heart that day, and something else, too. My trust.”
Dialogue is a particular strength in this book, hitting the sweet spot between exposition and naturalism. Chats are interesting, intelligent, fresh, and cover everything from literature to monogamy to politics. This is a debut that may sell itself as a murder mystery but there is much more going on between the covers. The Truants is a campus novel, a love story, a book that delves into messy, triangular relationships and their consequences. Or, as Lorna says of Christie, “‘The biggest question in this book is not “Whodunit?” but “Could you?”
