Unprofessional encounters

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 18

Unprofessional encounters

The Natural Order. By Ursula Bentley. Arena/Hutchinson, 1983. 218 pp. $8.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Diane Prout) Many a young, literate English teacher has turned her or his rueful early experiences in the classroom into hard cash with a book of lively and selective anecdotes about the adolescent of the species. E. R. Braithewaite’s “To Sir With Love” became a box-office hit when it was adapted for film. “Up The Down Staircase” showed up the absurdities of American high school administration. Closer to home, Freda Bream’s “Chalk Dust and Chewing Gum” and “I’m Sorry Amanda” highlighted some of the joys and frustration of teaching in one of our local secondary schools. Ursula Bentley’s “The Natural Order” may not find a place on the school library shelf. Untrained and inexperienced, her young narrator takes on more than she bargained for with the boys of the Blessed Ambrose Carstairs Grammar School. The consequences are tragi-comic. Together with two childhood friends, in assumed Bronte-esque roles (sensitivity and dedication to the noble cause of Art and Life) she soon finds out what slings and arrows the smelly, unwashed lower orders of 3B are capable of dishing out, day by day, in the enforced confines of the schoolroom. The horrors of discipline and the unwelcome advances of a fellow staff member are compensated for by the delights of professional and unprofessional encounters of a close

kind with Shackleton, the Wunderkind of the Upper Sixth. The intellectual delight and physical anguish that their illicit liaisons afford is the stuff of this very funny, if at times self-consciously clever, book. The writer’s wit and fascination with the joys of language tend to overshadow the pathetic and vulnerable situation of her chief characters, so that the reader tends to become emotionally detached. Nevertheless, “The Natural Order” offers a highly comic, yet hard-headeed look at what is probably one of the most unnatural social institutions.