Lisa: Don’t feel stupid — the book doesn’t actually say what happens to Fall. However, McAdam did say in a Giller panel that I saw that he “had killed off one of his characters”, so I think we can safely presume she froze to death on the banks of the river. It hadn’t occured to me that he might have killed her and then lied to himself — the way the book reads, he just abandoned her after throwing her crutches away.

Steph’s comment has opened the door on something I wanted to say in the original review and have been biting my tongue on (no longer, however) ever since.

As my comments on the dialogue indicate, I was already rather grumpy about the book when the “incident” took place — Noel’s advance on Fall, throwing away her crutches and abandoning her. Oh boy, I thought, now we have a direct comparison with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and I don’t think McAdam is up to that at all.

He proves that he isn’t. While Tartt did a great job at exploring the descent and angst of her protagonists after the murder, Fall does little but wander in confusion. Noel does go through a transformation (I’m inclined to agree with Steph’s “pseudo” addition), but it is both incomplete and unconvincing. And while I am quite happy with books that have ambiguous endings, this one is not ambiguous — it is simply unresolved.

The Secret History is normally regarded as more popular than literary, but for any reader contemplating a book about “young person descends into evil” it wins on every count — better written, better story, better reading experience.

I agree with you on most points…I don’t like stream-of-consciousness writing like Julius’ point of view, and I found the really long sex scenes annoying, as I’m not a prude, but don’t like sex scenes like that if they’re not necessary. I get that Julius is sex-obsessed with the many references to his masturbation throughout the novel. The only thing I can figure is that McAdam was trying to show that they were in love? I don’t know.

I think what kept me reading was knowing that Noel was slowly turning out to be a lot different than I thought at the beginning of the novel–the pseudo-transformation (or true revelation of character, I guess) was intriguing to me. And I still wonder what really happened on the beach with Meg.

I hated the ending, though, with no resolution, just kind of a ‘some people are bad, and boarding schools can breed bad people’ kind of moral.

Anyway, I would not recommend the book to anyone. It didn’t take me long to read, but I don’t feel edified in any way by it. I think I’ll try out a couple of those other books you mentioned.