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Dark Like Under, Alice Chadwick’s ambitious and affecting debut novel, begins and ends at midnight. The 24 hours in between, while at times sunlit and sweltering, hang heavy with the shadow cast by the night before.
That shadow is the death of Mr Ardennes. The story is set in England in the 1980s and it begins with Robin and Jonah, two teenagers at the local grammar school, bumping into Mr Ardennes, a well-liked teacher at the school. It is Sunday night – or Monday morning – and they have slipped away from a party. They meet on the banks of the weir, where he is taking one of his regular late night walks, and exchange pleasantries. He appears distracted. “He looked a bit rough,” observes Jonah. His hands seem oddly heavy in his pockets, “like weights”. At the next morning’s school assembly, his death is announced.
The narrative proceeds moment by moment, as if in real time, with each chapter time-stamped and capturing a particular scene throughout the day – assembly, lessons, lunch break, more lessons, the walk home, the pub in the evening, a midnight rendezvous. Each scene inhabits the consciousness of a different character, student or teacher, and explores the ripple effects of this horrendous event as well as the multitude of hopes, fears and desires that make up their inner lives.
While the story flits from character to character, the guiding light is Thomasin Carmichael, or Tin. Tin is beautiful and aloof and a source of infatuation for those around her. Robin recalls that the summer they first met she had “made the hot, empty days sparkle like broken glass”. Robin and Tin are best friends, but since Robin left the party with Jonah, Tin’s sometime boyfriend, the two have suffered something of a breach. This provides a secondary emotional weight that hangs over the day.
Chadwick is very good at evoking the sensory and emotional overload that comes with adolescence. Everything is too much and freighted with importance: every touch, taste, smell – not to mention who you sit next to in class (“Tin might never sit here again. Robin’s eyes blur”). To lie on the grass under a warm sun during break is to be overcome on all fronts: “[Tin] rolls over, warm on the warm ground, her breasts, her pelvis, the fabric of her uniform everywhere touching. Desire, supple and expansive, rises all around, in the wide, dry reach of the earth, each thirsty pore, going unspecific ... Her skin is live with heat, with the sharp pins of the grass. The high sun presses down; water moves deep below, clean and cool with time.”
Equally well summoned is the tedium of growing up in a small town in England. “Often they wandered around, any combination of them, between the pub that let them in, the off-licence that sold them vermouth and the roundabout where they drank it.” There are countless authentically dreary details – the room-temperature sandwich wrapped in clingfilm for lunch, the geography homework on the new retail development around the ring road. There are also, naturally, 80s cultural references galore – the Cure, Hubba Bubba, Flashdance, Sony Walkman – as well as the obligatory nods to Thatcher, Greenham Common and jobcentres.
But not much is made of these political references; they feel more like authorial set dressing than the real concerns of the characters. Indeed, it is a frustrating habit of the book to raise intriguing suggestions without following them through. The most important of these is the story behind Mr Ardennes’s shocking act, which becomes only less clear as cryptic remarks are made about the rottenness of the school and the culpability of the headmaster, Gomme, an underexplored character.
Nevertheless, as an evocation of teenage, and even adult, confusion and inscrutability in a setting that magnifies such emotions, Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic. For the reader, it is a day well spent.
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