Customer Reviews

Honorable Profession

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I thouroughly enjoyed this novel, fast-paced and blunt about the sexual politics of a suburban high school, between both faculty and students. Focussing on the sexual ambiguity of popular English teacher Miles Bannon, "An Honourable Profession" exposes the homophobia in our institutions, our children, and ourselves. With a complex network of vivid characters surrounding him, and an ever-widening scandal involving a lockerroom rape, suspected pedophilia, alchoholism, promiscuity, and suicide, L"Heureux's tale balances a fine line between crass sensationalism and sober depiction of real problems. I was tempted at times to write him off as a homophobe, but the story must be read to its conclusion to appreciate his motives in exposing homophobia,its prevalence and insidious acceptance in the rearing of teenagers. But this is a plot driven story, not at all a polemic. It reminded me of the great novel "Staggerford" by John Hassler with its understanding of the dynamic between teens and their teachers and of the sometimes desperate politics of the teacher's lounge. I read this novel in three days and was very satisfied.

Miles Bannon is a successful English teacher, know affectionately as Milo by his students he is the most popular teacher in the school. But when a boys' initiation prank in the sports changing rooms goes wrong, it sets in motion a series of events that look to ruin his reputation and his beloved career.

Miles does what he can to help the victim of the prank, but the boy, distanced by his father and initially withdrawn, develops a crush for Miles, leading to confusion for Miles, and eventually accusations of improper behaviour on his part.

An Honorable Profession chronicles the events from the prank to the end of the school year and Miles' final realisations about himself. We follow him as he deals not only with the troubled boy and the rumours and accusations, but also his dying mother, his clinging and troubled girlfriend and the voracious Diane, who heads his English Department.

It is a story of eventual personal triumph over adversity, and makes for a satisfying read, if a little repetitive at times. I found myself switching from admiring Miles to almost despairing for him when on the occasion he makes some less than wise decisions. But finally one has to admire him for coming through it all one way or another.

What happens when a teacher is unjustly accused of the crime of child molestation? Their lives are stripped bare. Secrets, which we all harbor - those personal, sacred things we choose not to share - become public and shine an ugly shadow on us. It's hard to maintain one's dignity and go forward.

This novel deals with an ordinary man who must examine his ethical and moral fiber. No better or worse than most of us, once accused, his actions are viewed from a different perspective. He is guilty until proven innocent. Even then, people will never look at him in the same way as prior to the allegation.

"He got up in the morning - every day in January, February and March - and prayed to survive
the day's insults and ridicule and contempt, and he endured it somehow, with kids looking at
him funny, watching his crotch sometimes, flirting with him to catch him out. Nothing was
beneath them. They would say anything, do anything, to expose him further, to see him raw".
(P. 360)

This is a book that has staying power. It is one that you will remember years after reading it. It is an amazing and all too true novel.

Reading this novel (by an accomplished novelist and long-time teacher of writing) showed me vividly a major difference between bad and good fiction. Good storytelling becomes real. It creates an actual world whose author truly feels and knows the characters and their motivations and shows them in a plot whose action-turns may be surprising but are plausible, realistic, valid. In contrast, a bad kind of chronicle remains mechanical. The goal is not to experience insight into human nature, it is to be entertained with conflict-action-suspense. Here, the characters remain cardboard stick-figures, and their changes are less plausible and carefully foreshadowed, than yanked about to keep up the entertainment factor.

"So the only problem is," which type of novel does this tale more resemble?

I began to get suspicious when I experienced "reader-whiplash" at the oscillating or pinball-bouncings of the main character, Miles, the high school teacher. Contradictory behavior, plus changes which initially seem implausible, are great if truly motivated, but are unsatisfying if only for plot-entertainment. As for Miles as sexual being, "wham" he's potent with his girlfriend, but then "slam" he can't get aroused-but why? "Bang" he's blah-uneasy about a gay student, but then "boing" he has an encounter with a gay man probably under stress from his mother's death-but why, and who knows? (Much better rendered is the girlfriend. She is contradictory also, but her on-and-off attitude toward Miles sensitively reflects not just a need to keep our attention, but the nuances of the unresolved problems of a battered woman. Plugs into the undertow beneath. Dependent closeness along with sadistic hostility and evasion. That mirrors the truer water-table complexity of life underneath any placid or rushing stream-flow of plot.)

Reading fiction, do you ever feel you are gliding along the ice-skating surface of plot for its own sake, conflict-action-suspense, as against immersing into the pond (or Jacuzzi) of real life really felt and rendered by the writer? I did here, and too much, considering it was written by an accomplished writer and long-term teacher of writing. Too much anyhow.