The Clamour King – a compulsive and unusual read

The Clamour King is one of the most absorbing and well-written novels I’ve read in a long, long while, a real page-turner. The sense of being in the rule-bound, emotionally charged and sexually repressed world of a boys’ boarding school is almost tangible.

Most authors, particularly American ones, have difficulty writing about children, either making them behave and sound like walking clichés or presenting them as miniature adults, but Muirhead does this extraordinarily well. The boys’ banter and inventive cruelty, their anxieties, obsessions and thirst for new experience, are all entirely believable.

It’s a difficult book to categorise and hence difficult to describe without giving a false impression of its totality. Dark and disturbing certainly, reminiscent in many ways of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – and it deals with some of the same themes – but it is not, like Golding’s novel, a morality tale. Nor is it just a psychological or supernatural thriller, though there are elements of that too. Nor is it dominated by the complexities of Greek drama, as the somewhat misleading cover suggests, though the play the boys perform in the story does resonate with what happens in their lives, and the lives of their teachers. So what is it? I suggest you read it and find out. And if I’ve made it sound ponderous, it is not that either – Muirhead’s elegant style makes for an easy read. I read it twice and found it just as fresh and engaging the second time around.

Walter Kerr