The Kindle sample sucked me in right away. It's not the crash-bang action-packed opener I ask of my young screenwriting students. There's no clanking regional patois to suck in my primal pre-linguistic brain, like a riddle that needs answering. Just a conversational tone, a familiar setting seen from the other side of the desk, and a man to take us through it, a lonely and confused thirtysomething primary-school teacher named Joe Campion.
Teacher Noir is a great hook but this story's not really 'about' teaching. Joe does his job with integrity but I wouldn't say it's his vocation, it's just the place he goes every day, a place where he bumps up against bureaucracy and mediocrity, where he gets bitten by stimuli that set him reeling, spinning between homes, between peace and violence, between his laddish drug-loving youth and his crummy, lonely adult existence. Primary school is a great setting for a tale of personal downfall, the innocence of the kids a perfect offset for Joe's hopeless, buried rage.
The highest compliment I can pay In Loco Parentis is that it's instinctively written, and this makes sense because it's also the nature of Joe. He's a study in what happens if you do whatever you feel, whenever you feel it. This is how you shake up your boring life, folks, just put pleasure and the senses first and stuff all the rest.
I agree with the Amazon reviewer who said the manuscript was "stripped bare"; the red pen has been artfully applied and the story is stronger for it. I don't usually care for present tense narration, even less for tense-jumping between past and present, but it was a perfect choice for this book.
I loved the little wisps of paragraph, the short scenes that were woven together so intuitively. In Loco Parentis isn't a 'plotty' book, it's more like poetry (the fluid and easy spoken-word kind, street poetry, not the dense and inaccessible wordgames that fill the ruling-class anthologies). I think that's why it jumped my pile so easily; reading it was like falling into a moving river (yeah, if you've seen that episode of I Shouldn't Be Alive where the father and son are dragged along by their faces under an ice shelf!)
In the final chapters I began to anticipate 'dying like a dog' with Joe, as we did with Kafka's hero in The Trial (Joe Campion, Josef K? Coincidence?) and the feeling of dread was palpable. Mr Bird is a master, though, and every time you think you know where he's going, he listens to his artistic gut and eludes you again, leading you finally, heart in mouth, all the way to the End.
Get this book on Amazon.com or Amazon UK and plonk it right on top of your pile.
