Teacher learns to hate

Press, 13 December 1986, Page 27

Teacher learns to hate

The Deputy Head. By Colleen Reilly. Allen and Unwin, 1986. 206 pp. $24.95.

(Reviewed by Diane Prout) . Henry George Williams, divorced, aged 53, a teacher, and father of two adult daughters, is a man who believes he has the boundaries of his life well under control. Neat, methodical, apparently attractive to younger staff members, he seems boringly selfsufficient and complacent in his ability to stay in command of his feelings towards his ex-wife and children. What starts off as a pupil exercise in self-awareness suggested by a firstyear colleague, Sarah Arkwright, becomes a compulsive project for Henry as, in the space of a year,.he becomes increasingly trapped and threatened by the women who surround him. His struggle to stay uninvolved, to maintain a critical objectivity over their posturings and problems, becomes more pronounced until he makes an abortive attempt at suicide • at the end. Henry is a deputy-head — a Prufrock character who is not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be. An “attendant Lord,” he finds the final pressure of becoming Principal too much to bear.

Fussy and pedantic, he irritates the' reader with his teacherly mannerisms , and lack of spontaneity. Yet he is not ’

without a sense of irony and his. insight into the causes of daughterMarian’s self-indulgent attention-. seeking, together with his concern for his grandson, Tom, show him to be a perceptive and not entirely priggish character. In spare diary prose, Henry, unconsciously reveals his limitations; as a man. His lack of interest in sex and his bewilderment when' confronted by it show him to be al naive figure of pathos. The more he withdraws, the morel disturbed he becomes. He finallyrealises an important truth about himself. “One cannot know love unless one knows hate.” While the rest of his - womenfolk were doing all the loving, and caring it was left to Henry to do' the hating. ...» New Zealand author Colleen Reilly has managed to get inside the mind of 53-year-old Henry remarkably well. ' Although, as she has said, “If I had to get into graphic details about how men feel in the sex act, I’d be in trouble.” On neutral ground she presents a convincing, if predictably limited, character who fails finally to make any radical change to his life as a result of his experiences.