We are all, unfortunately, grimly familiar with the drill now. You see something on social media, a rumour of something happening in a school far away (usually in the US).
In the minutes that follow the story migrates from Twitter to the mainstream media where network news programs begin to speculate about what’s going on, using shots from helicopters and live feeds from reporters on the scene who know about as much as you. The situation is either live or contained. There is one gunman or two. Numbers of victims begin to be a part of the story. It is familiar, depressing and seemingly unstoppable. The names of the places live on in a dark pantheon of grief and shattered lives: Sandy Hook, Dunblane, Columbine, Parkland...
In the days that follow the motives of the attackers, their histories, psychologies and political outlooks are analyzed in minute detail.
In her fourth novel Three Hours, Rosamund Lupton tells the story of a school attack, as it unfolds, from multiple perspectives: the protagonists, the victims in the school, the police officers trying to contain the event, the anxious parents waiting for news outside. But the story also embraces them role beyond the cloistered school, addressing contemporary themes such as our attitudes to outsiders and the pressures of being a modern teenager.
But ‘tells the story’ really doesn’t do justice to what Lupton has brilliantly, mesmerisingly, so convincingly done in Three Hours. She takes the reader into the unfolding drama and into the minds of those who are there, not just in those moments where they are contemplating the drama around them, but also the moments and the events that led them to where they are.
The drama is set in a school on the coast of Somerset on a winter’s day just as the morning is getting started. The school is large set across several acres of woodland with junior and senior schools separated across distances that become significant. The action primarily focuses around three groups of students. One is in the school theatre, about to rehearse a production of Macbeth. Others are in the library. A group of small children are in the pottery barn (It’s a private school!!).
As the attack unfolds, the headmaster becomes the first victim, shot by one of two attackers, and he is dragged to safety by students who nurse him in the library.
The students are the stars of the book, proving themselves to be courageous, selfless, funny and clever despite their fear and uncertainty. Given the action only takes three hours, Lupton manages to develop the characters of a sufficient number that she can inject their personalities into the narrative and enrich the story with them. (You are likely to want to adopt Molly, the 16-year-old who nurses the wounded headmaster. )
Further drama is imposed on the story by the closing in of the weather as a snow storm limits police visibility and options, placing all the pressure on police psychologist Rose Polstein to uncover the identity and motives of the attackers in order to figure out how to stop them.
This is a breathtaking novel, with as well crafted a plot as I can recall reading. It is also emotional and gripping, the sort of story that is with you even when you’re not reading and that demands you get back to it quickly. But for me it was defined by its humanity, its exploration of what it means to be brave, what it means to be a part of a community, what it means to be good. Read it.
Currently reading: The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
Listening to: Bury Them Deep by James Oswald