Wilberforce
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At St. Stephen's Academy, the students are on the verge of revolt. While the younger boys plot an insurrection, the older ones are preoccupied with sneaking out-of-bounds, thrashing each other, tearing each other's clothes off-or some combination of the three. Morgan Wilberforce, for one, can't take it any longer.
Everything Wilberforce touches turns to disaster in his desperate attempts to fight off desire, boredom, and angst. He knocks himself unconscious tackling the unattainable Spaulding on the rugby pitch, his headmaster detests him for crimes committed years ago, and even his closest friends are subjecting him to physical tortures normally reserved for juniors. When an accident at the boarding school leaves him with more suffering than he could have fathomed, he finds himself alone and adrift. And the workaday charms of cricket practice, Victorian pornography, canings from classmates, and fumbling with the pub-keeper's daughter can only do so much to mend a broken body and a restless heart.
Stylishly inventive, H. S. Cross has crafted an imaginative, ritualistic world of men and boys narrowly confined by tradition and authority. Wilberforce is an indelible portrait of a young man caught between lust and cruelty, grief and God, frustrated love and abject longing-and a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a brilliant new novelist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut, Cross spins the scruffy narrative of Morgan Wilberforce, a 17-year-old student and troublemaker at St. Stephen's Academy, a small British private school, in 1926. When he's not sneaking away to the local pub, Wilberforce is injuring himself on the rugby pitch, battling fellow students, and pining for the affection of both male and female peers. Amid the growing chaos, Wilberforce begins a romantic tryst with fellow student Charles Spaulding, yet when one of Spaulding's other lovers learns of the relationship, a student ends up dead in a tragic accident, leaving Wilberforce as a shell of his former self. Now hallucinating good and evil versions of himself, the young man slowly marches down a destructive path of sexual escapades and violence. John Grieves, a history teacher at the academy, attempts to help Wilberforce through his perpetual plights, yet the school has more than one firebrand to oversee: a group of disgruntled third-year students are fed up and begin setting fires and gumming up campus locks. Though Cross succeeds in creating a multilayered drama, one of the major perspectives of the book abruptly vanishes, leaving the reader to wonder why it was included in the first place. In addition, the boys of the academy frequently act with a na vet that feels far younger than their years. Still, readers will find enough angst and drama to carry them through this story of sentimental education.
