Customer Reviews

The Rehearsal

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If you are the type of person who wants their novels to start at the beginning, build character and plot before coming to a satisfying "they all lived happily ever after" ending, then avoid this book at all costs. You will hate it. But I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a book as much as this one. For a first novel, it is ambitious, daring and complex, and yet it works beautifully. I would not be surprised if this wins a number of awards this year - it has all the ingredients that the award-givers seem to love.

The basis for the story is a scandal at a school involving a music teacher, Mr Saladin, and Victoria, the elder sister of one of the main characters, Isolde. This impact of this event is viewed both from the point of view of the girls at the school, and also as the basis for an end of year drama production by the local drama Institute. The two stories start separately, but inevitably mesh as the book progresses. The drama school bit is arguably a bit of a stretched conceit, but this is forgivable as the author explores the concepts of reality and performance. But this is just one of the aspects of this book.

Was the errant Mr Saladin any worse than the dark and mysterious "saxophone teacher" whose attempts to control and interfere with her charges appears at times more sinister than Mr Saladin's sexual urges. But her habit of speaking exactly what she thinks is hilarious at times. And the author's psychological insights into the fears of teenagers growing up are beautifully observed. And how does the media (in this case a play) reflect reality - and does reality exist - and how much of it is performance (as Shakespeare once noted), and so much more....

There's dark humour aplenty mixed with the fears and excitement of growing up. It is a very difficult book to describe - the voices sound real in an unreal way. The closest I can get to explaining it is a line given by the Head of Acting at the drama Institute who likens plays to the ancient Greek god statues - they are not meant to be representative but they allow you a point of access that seems real. If that sounds pretentious mumbo-jumbo, that is what makes this book so excellent - it is such a complex tapestry of a story that it could easily have come over as pseudo-high brow and pretentious, but it doesn't largely because it's told with humour and sympathy. The characters, while not all likeable, are all easy to sympathise with and all are clearly drawn. It's not an easy book to start, but after ten pages, I was hooked and it's the kind of book that you can re-read and get more out of. And the more you read, the more it rings in your head, like a piece of classical music the phrases and stories are inter-woven.

I can see why some will hate this book (there is little in the way of direct narrative, the time scenes jump around, and some of the voices are far from naturalistic, and the ending is a little anti-climactic), but it is one of the most innovative and intricate books I've read in a long while and as a first novel it is astonishingly adept. I will be recommending this book to everyone.

The Rehearsal is a supremely confident debut that is all the more astonishing when one learns that its author, Eleanor Catton, is barely out of her teen years herself. Set in an elite drama school, music studio, and a neighboring high school, the book is a close-up look at the self-conscious agony of those who are on the cusp of adulthood, focusing particularly on an affair between a music teacher and a teenage girl.

Right from the start, the reader is aware that this is not going to be a "business as usual" type of book. One of the first characters we meet is the saxophone teacher who, we learn enjoys the "strange satisfaction that is got by saying something that nobody hears." She tells one mother, "I require of all my students that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom."

The novel narrows its focus on two students in particular: Isolde, whose sister, Victoria, is at the center of the teacher-student scandal, and Stanley, a sensitive drama student whose father (a psychiatrist) is too fond of pedophilia jokes. They are damaged, as is every student in this narrative. The saxophone teacher says, "You want to be damaged. All of you. That is the one quality all my students have in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely."

The Rehearsal soars when it explores the masks we wear, the roles we play, and the templates we use to "fake" emotions. Again from the saxophone teacher: "If you were not mothers, and if you were looking very carefully, you might be able to see a role, a character and also a person struggling to maintain that character..." And again: "You will see exactly what you want to see and nothing more." This theme is brilliantly explored and realized on at least two levels. The drama student Stanley must constantly pretend to be someone else as an actor (in one exercise, he goes into the world for the afternoon, pretending to be Joe Pitt); simultaneously, he pretends in his personal life, using well-worn templates to learn to feel and to "act as if." Ultimately, ALL the characters are performers -- the saxophone teacher, the students, Stanley's one-dimension father -- and the reader finds himself or herself as a member of the audience, watching the action unfold, determining what is true and what is not.

Saturated with sexual tension, bursting with insights, and focusing on explorations of identity and longing, this is a book that is seeking to pave new territory. The saxophone teacher says, "Remember that these years...are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after." I finished the last page in amazement that a debut author this young could have gotten everything so RIGHT.

Reading this debut novel was like sitting in a black box theatre watching a play, suspended in time, and often like watching a rehearsal of the play that I am watching. As the characters move into focus, the lighting techniques add a perspective to the dialog. Just like a play's story is told through dialog; lighting; and movement (called blocking in theater lingo), Catton's novel coheres and communicates through the visible frame of a theatre lens; the boundaries of the theatre are the boundaries of the narrative technique that she employed to tell this story. Any action that is not possible within the constraints of a stage is not part of the immediate action of the novel. In lesser hands, this could have gotten weary for the reader. However, it felt like Catton effortlessly exhaled this novel. The theme of escaping yourself--of desperately wanting to be someone else--is a context of narrative construction as well as foundation for the story.

The story takes place between three neighboring groups of students. The Drama Institute is a drama college for aspiring actors, and the girls' high school, Abbey Grange, is an elite private school. The music school rounds out the settings of this novel. The sax teacher, a female of unknown identity, is often seen in shadow or startling light. Speaking of identity, only first or last names are identified, all except for one replacement teacher, Jean Critchley, who came on board when music teacher Mr. Saladin was let go. He had a scandalous affair with Victoria, one of the girls from Abbey Grange. This affair is the centerpiece story, from which all other stories, themes, and actions unfold. The abbreviated names personify the characters and their motivations in shadow for much of the story.

This is a cloistered world where arch teenagers say cruel things to each other and communicate through a pecking order. The most genetically sparkling are the most popular, and deviance is not tolerated (although desired). Reality is less authentic than truth, insist the acting teachers. Truth is uncovered and dislodged via a staged experience. The Theater of Cruelty is an exercise taught to first year drama students that both perverts and illuminates the human boundaries and boundlessness of ambition and fear.

The sax teacher speaks with a frank and flinty tongue to intrusive stage mothers and manipulates her students into shocking reenactments of her own past desires. Julia, (earmarked as the deviant ) and Isolde, (the beloved and in vogue), two of her students from the high school, feel caged by their status. Additionally, the students envy Isolde's sister, Victoria, because she was desired by an adult. She is now a celebrated victim. The sax teacher taps into their confusion and pulls their emotional strings, inwardly avid as they puppet her predilections.

The acting teachers, known mainly as The Head of Acting and The Head of Movement, seek out favorite students who are reinventions of their past selves. Stanley is an earnest first-year student looking for his niche and willing to do audacious things to shed his virginal skin and experience the adult and sophisticated world. As reality is eclipsed by truth, the core of human behaviors--shame, fear, love, hate, and ambition--are played out with glee and gloom on a stage of human experience.

As a former and very amateur stage actress, I was fortunate to take acting classes with strong teachers that taught me techniques from various schools of thought. It allowed me to identify that this novel did a masterful job of conveying the philosophies and approaches to acting that are taught by places such as the Berghof Studio, the Stella Adler Academy, and the Method school of acting. Catton, raised in New Zealand, was twenty-two when she wrote this impeccably researched book. She explored and exploited the stage experience with a witty and subversive precision. Moreover, she told a story about human nature, about pretending and escaping your limitations, about navigating through the quagmire of human desires--to find truth though lies.

THE REHEARSAL

We meet Victoria and Isolde, two sisters who attend a private girls school, Abbey Grange. A short distance away is the Drama Institute. These two establishments collide when an affair between Victoria and her teacher, Mr. Saladin, comes to light. The Drama Institute takes on this scandal and works it into their year-end performance production.

The book deals with the reactions of students to the shocking affair between Victoria and Mr. Saladin. Many of the students share their thoughts with the saxophone teacher who tutors many of them. The saxophone teacher, in my humble opinion, was the most outstanding character in this book. Her dry and witty humor, outspoken remarks, her almost cruel conversations and observations were simply hilarious and made her very life-like and believable.

As for the other characters, they seemed almost cardboard in comparison to the saxophone tutor who stole the entire show -- for me.

The book takes place within a year's time. The chapters read quickly and are headed by days of the week and/or month. The book revolves around the students reactions, thoughts, and the consequences of the affair.

Ms. Catton was in her early 20's when she wrote this book, which was written as her master's thesis for creative writing! This book was honored by being shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian First Book Award. Ms. Catton's writing skills have much to offer to the literary world.

This book is well written and reads in a very different and interesting fashion. Real life and the drama of the theater clash together. However, this book was hard for me to read and I felt as if I were plodding through. I wanted to enjoy it much more than I did, but it just wasn't my cuppa.

Thank you.

Pam

Though this first novel is structurally challenging, the author keeps the tension high in her juxtapositioning of scenes that do not permit the reader to ascertain whether they are witnessing reality or performances - replicas. Ostensibly, the primary concern is to resolve the alleged seduction of a senior student at an all-girls school, Abbey Grange, by a band teacher; but then there is the possibility that the teen-ager has precipitated the situation through purposeful usage of her nubile charms. Eschewing the conventional path of detailing a police investigation, the author dramatizes the event through the vehicle of a play produced by college-aged students at an adjacent drama institute. The subjectivity and arbitrariness of artistic interpretation and persuasiveness are now injected into the entire scenario in addition to the near impossibility of gauging whether scenes and dialog stand outside the play or are a part of it. Given its innovative approach, this novel does require sharp attention.

At the drama school, the students are literally forced to "peel" away social veneers and defenses and to embrace authenticity, including a willingness to reveal one's most intimate moments. The school has departments of Acting, Improvisation, Movement, Voice, etc. The instructors are almost harsh in their demands, looking for ways to humiliate. Yet exercises in role playing underscore that actors play parts, which are seldom coincident with searches for truth. One student realizes that "Theater isn't real life, and it isn't a perfect copy of real life. It's just a point of access." This is the sort of training and mindset that are the basis of the drama students' construction of a play to elucidate what happened at the girls' school.

On the other hand, the teen-age girls at the school seek to become worldly, game playing and posturing being part of the process. They may have budding sexual prowess, but are apprehensive of how to advance to womanhood, which explains their cliquishness and conformity and their ready cruelty in labeling those a bit different as sexually deficient or deviant. Victoria, the girl who took up with Mr. Saladin, is both condemned for going outside the group and feared because she has gained knowledge and experience that they all desire. Even her younger sister Isolde wonders "How did you know that he would receive you, gather you up and press hard against you and even give out a little strangled moan like a cry, like a cry in the back of his throat?".

A very interesting character/actor is an independent teacher who rents space and gives saxophone lessons to some of the girls. Her attitude towards parents and the girls is seen in her caustic comment to a mother:

"If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realizes her body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. ... I cannot teach children."

And the snare drum in the theater goes "kiss-kiss-kiss." She acts as more of a therapist and instigator than teacher, as she practically intimidates the girls into revealing their thoughts and actions and suggests actions to take. Most of these interactions seem to be a part of the play as various moods are created through the use of lighting, music, etc. The explanations presented by the various girls change from scene to scene. For example, has Isolde been sexually awakened by the mature Julia, a senior student, or were her first experiences with Stanley, a hesitant, stumbling student from the institute?

The author definitely suggests that the complexity and sophistication of the female personality surpasses that of men; there is a mysteriousness that is reinforced by the uncertainties of this novel. Stanley at one point concludes that girls have a "witchy capacity." They "constantly and consciously [distinguish] between themselves and the performance of themselves." This strangeness, according to one of the instructors, causes "many of us [men] to fear women." But the author is perhaps most interested in the emotions and intensity of young girls attracted to each other. Men are largely secondary in this story: there, but not crucial.

More broadly, the point is well made that life in many ways is a play, or more pointedly an ongoing rehearsal; we all play roles, though not necessarily happily. In other words, reality is the sum of performances. Is there room for truth in such a world? If so, it lies largely undiscovered in this novel.

One verity is that this novel is a remarkable effort from a young author. It is no small feat to weave a story of this complexity and perceptiveness, although the disjointedness is a bit of a distraction. It is a highly provocative, sensuous, and insightful coming-of-age book. There really is no plot to speak of. It is difficult to speak of characters when they are characterizations of actors. However, the enigmatic sax teacher is central to the book and Julia is a commanding and smart, cynical presence. Of course, props are important in a theater. In the author's eyes a saxophone can become "more alive than you are."; they can be caressed or positioned as an object or weapon.

A flippant title, perhaps, for a review of this brilliant book, except that flippancy is Eleanor Catton's weapon of choice in tackling some very serious subjects. In alternating chapters, her first novel follows the lives of a group of girls at Abbey Grange, a private New Zealand high school, and of a boy named Stanley in his first year at drama school. Although the two threads take a long time to connect up in plot terms, their common concern is obvious: that sexual education in adolescence involves more than physical experience and emotional response, but also the whole question of personal identity and role-playing. Life becomes a stage on which to deliver well-worn lines or frantically improvise, where even the actors have trouble distinguishing what is real.

The catalyst for the girls is a saxophone teacher to whom many of them go for private lessons. This unnamed woman has a gloriously irreverent voice, saying to one of the mothers, for example: "I require of all my students that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom." Or perhaps thinking this rather than saying it; one of the glories of the book is that everybody seems to be on a truth serum, coming out with thoughts that would probably never be spoken in public. Or seeing through a lie to the truth behind it, as when a woman talks about her husband: "I'll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I'll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I'll panic and blurt out, I love you. I'm always motivated by the oddest things."

Early in the book, there is a scandal at Abbey Grange. The band teacher, Mr. Saladin, is accused of abusing a pupil and forced to resign. Group counseling sessions are arranged for all those closest to the perhaps-willing victim. The counselor talks of harassment as a form of control, but one girl objects: "I don't agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control. Sleeping with a minor isn't exciting because you get to boss them around. It's exciting because you're risking so much... because you might lose." This sensible but subversive viewpoint is typical of the book as a whole, almost every page of which manages to turn received wisdom on its head, whether in outrageous contradiction or gentle parody. As an example of the latter, here is the younger sister of the abused girl telling the sax teacher what she learned in counseling: "We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time. You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can't really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no." The truth of the last sentence does little to excuse the well-intentioned psychic time-bombs that precede it.

I have to admit that this book might almost have been written for me. As an opera director, I teach acting to musicians not so very much older than the people in this novel. While the saxophone lessons are a surreal vehicle for many things besides music, the early chapters at the drama school contain some of the most insightful descriptions of the acting process that I have ever read, so much so that I am seriously considering making the book required reading for my students. Although they at first seem irrelevant to the developing plot, their fine parsing of truth and illusion gives us a tool with which to look more closely at the young people discovering their own capacities for friendship, trust, and love. As the saxophone teacher tells another parent, elucidating the title, "Remember that these years of your daughter's life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after." Then she adds, with characteristically subversive honesty: "Remember that it's in her best interests to slip up now, while she's still safe." And the slips we certainly get!

In her speech to parents before her students' annual recital, the saxophone teacher virtually sums up the theme of the book. "There are people who can only see the roles we play, and there are people who can only see the actors pretending. But it is a very rare and strange thing that a person has the power to see both at once; this kind of double vision is a gift." It is this gift that Eleanor Catton, with x-ray insight, offers so entertainingly to her readers.

The US publisher of Eleanor Catton's "The Rehearsal" provided no information save for the brief plot summary Amazon has provided here, but a Google search turned up the information that Ms. Catton is a New Zealander, and that this is her first novel. (It was written in 2007 as a master's thesis, and was published there by a university press.) It's important to know that, because the author never indicates precisely where the events in the tale take place. It's helpful to know that the book takes place in the Southern Hemisphere, as the events are governed by the calendar of the school year.

The work is coldly intellectual, written in a deadpan prose style and divided into to alternating stories that of course eventually converge. In one, high school girls must deal with a case of the "molestation" (which eventually seems to be consensual) of one of their number by a teacher who has already been sacked before the tale begins. The victim herself appears only in a few scenes, and the story focuses on her sister and two of her friends, who are subjected to an unimaginative male counsellor after the incident, a counsellor who one of the girls dominates. They vent to their (never named) saxophone teacher--she's a rather meddlesome sort who seems to get off on listening to them. Their segments are divided by day of the week, told in present tense, and shift back and forth in time. (One incident is told twice from two different pov's.)

The other story deals with a young man named Stanley, who enrolls in a drama school--one that would seemingly be at home in one of Dante's circles of hell. This part is told in past tense, and its segments are divided by months of the year. Again, they go back and forth in time, but seem to take place over the course of a year, from one November (i.e., spring) to the next.

As Amazon's product description notes, the school puts on a play based on the events of the secondary school, which adds to the intellectual puzzle the author has created. The lines spoken by some of the girls (and the sax teacher) are literary, hyperdramatic on occasion, and you begin to wonder if these are actually the words of the girls, or lines in the play. It's hard to tell, because we never actually get to see the play performed--or do we?

In the end, it probably doesn't matter much. The whole tale seems to take place under glass: the sax teacher's studio is located near the girls' high school, and the drama school, where the theatre in which the play will take place is located, are all within walking distance of each other in the unnamed city, so that we seem to be observing the whole thing as we would, say, a museum diorama--one that has been animated by its creator.

Very intriguing.

I can see why so many people around the world have enjoyed Eleanor Catton's debut novel, "The Rehearsal" since its publication in 2008. Catton has a wicked sense of humor, a wild imagination and a stunning way with words. She's just not much of a storyteller. Actually, that's an unfair criticism given how obviously little interest Catton has in conventional plotting. Coherence certainly isn't the point of "The Rehearsal;" what is escapes me.

Catton is clearly exploring the nature of performance and identity here; who we are (or pretend to be), how we "act" for one another, how artifice becomes reality etc. And had she written a short story or novella I might have been willing to play along. The woman, bless her, can write like nobody's business. It's pure pleasure to wallow in her turns of phrase, smart dialogue and sharp insights. But the book is ultimately a full-length exercise, something to admire (to a point), nothing in which one can get emotionally involved. (Again, not necessarily the author's point.) Call me traditional, but if I'm not emotionally involved in a book, regardless of the genre or format, I tend to turn off and stop turning pages.

"The Rehearsal" has a very dry, Monty Python sensibility to it. How well you respond to its conceit may depend on how much you enjoy, say, the Parrot sketch or "Life of Brian." Whereas I get and respect where the humor (or humour, in this case) is coming from, for me a little goes a long way.

I picked this book up and put it down about a hundred times the last 2 weeks. I'd read one of the short chapters, or two or three, and then shake my head in bewilderment. What is the point of this book? After asking myself that question, I finally decided that I didn't even care anymore and put it down after slogging 3/4 of the way through.

The premise was good -- a student's affair with a teacher is exposed and the fellow classmates react to the scandal with varying degrees of interest and dismay. Quite honestly, there was so little actually about the affair and the student reaction to that in this book -- so little that I kept paging backward thinking I'd missed something crucial. Much of the book centers around these female students' reaction to and interaction with their saxophone teacher and the goings on at the drama school of performing arts that they attend. The characters in the book have such strange names as Head of Acting and Head of Movement and that music teacher is referred to as the saxophone teacher throughout. Not sure what the point of that device was except to thoroughly confuse and confound me.

Without further ado, I can't recommend this book and I'd love to hear from someone who finds out what this "blur between fantasy and reality" is...

The author displays a talent and style which will not be overlooked.
We are introduced to Stanley, a high-school graduate newly accepted into drama school and Isolde, a character whose under aged sister has been involved with the school music teacher. A collection of interesting characters surround these two including a saxophone teacher and her female students, one of which is Isolde. It is such a clever story-line with realistic, well developed characters. It is a novel you will want to pass on to friends and family, highly recommended for book clubs as there is a lot to discuss.Seek it out and you will be rewarded.