North, the eponymous sophisticated and cultured Anglo-American adolescent who charms the pants off everyone he meets, often literally, is a pupil at a liberal school in Oxford. The English master, an authority on Milton, is particularly bowled over when North declares Paradise Lost to be his bible. He slips into the role of mentor, moved perhaps by the boy’s habit of kissing him on both cheeks when they meet, which raises eyebrows but impresses with its casual elegance. North does more than raise eyebrows when he invites his attractive history teacher, Bernie, to lunch and not as she had thought to discuss the Vienna Settlement. Already a sense of secrecy, unease and displacement comes off this book, something more sinister than the mere scandal of an unseemly love affair. This disorientation is subtly fanned by Brian Martin, who refuses to tells us whether North is a surname or Christian name; and the English teacher who remains merely ‘I’.
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