Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan review – sex and teenage secrets
Queer self-discovery drives this powerful coming-of-age debut set in a bohemian 1970s school
It might sound like a potentially familiar narrative: a queer coming-of-age story, charted across one single heat-crazed summer in the 70s. From its very first paragraphs, however, this debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story’s repeated eruptions of brutality.
We first meet Jean, our eponymous hero, as he is about to take his O-levels. He is sitting them at the unusually late age of 17; later, we will find out that this is because he has a history of violence, and has been excluded from every school he’s ever attended. To the despair of his teachers, Jean seems completely unable to learn. He is also a Jew in a school full of gentiles, the lone child of a single mother, a county-funded scholarship boy whose friendship group is unanimously monied and privileged. This is not, however, the story of a queer outsider battling to find himself in a setting of dreary conformity. Perched high on the Sussex Downs, Jean’s school specialises in colourful nonconformists; known to its pupils as The House of Nutters, its regime mixes high-risk bohemianism with the occasional dash of old-school protocol. Crucially, it is isolated, and its pupils are all male. It is a classic microcosm; a petri dish alive with potentially dangerous experiments in masculinity.
