Notes on a Scandal

The slow decline into obsession is like a slow growing cancer. The sickness of the heart soon controls the soul. Barbara Covett's long teaching career at St. Georges School affords her a critical opinion of her colleagues, old and new. With barely any friends, scarce family ties, and no love life to speak of, Barbara is an aging spinster alone with an ailing cat. Such bitter loneliness entitles Barbara to scoff at any relationship until she meets Sheba Hart. Sheba brings out a strange possessiveness in Barbara. As a pottery teacher Sheba is new to St. Georges and it's politics. Barbara takes Sheba under her wing and desires to be her only friend. Except Sheba is capable of making a variety of relationships which fuel Barbara's show more jealousies. Barbara reminded me of the manipulative Iago in the way that she slyly pushed Sue, another St. Georges colleague, out of the friendship with Sheba. Three is definitely a crowd.
As mentioned before, Sheba is capable of making connections quickly. When she starts a physical relationship with a sixteen year old student in her pottery class, Barbara seizes the opportunity to be Sheba's only nonjudgmental confident, further pulling Sheba into a sick dependency. However, Barbara's immature need to be on the high horse of morality gets the better of her and she risks Sheba's friendship by keeping a journal. The more obsessed Sheba gets with the schoolboy, the more reckless she becomes. How long before the house of cards come crashing down? show less

Why do we raise our eyebrows at relationships between two people of markedly different ages? Why are we in such a hurry to classify certain romantic entanglements as being "exploitative", and can we ever be clear exactly who is exploiting whom anyway? These are just some of the questions you're likely to ask yourself while reading Notes on a Scandal.

On paper, this looks like a pretty cut-and-dried case: a 42-year-old married female teacher pursues a sexual relationship with a 15/16-year-old schoolboy. It's criminal behaviour, it draws forth both scorn and condemnation from the media, it ruins lives and taints reputations - but it's testament to Heller's writing skills that by the end of the novel you may well find yourself sympathising show more with the "criminal" Sheba Hart rather than the "victim" Steven Connolly. After all, the novel suggests, Connolly basically just has a rather enjoyable sexual experience and then gets on with his life; it is Sheba who suffers as a result, Sheba who must endure not only the pangs of lost love but the pain of a broken marriage, a destroyed reputation and an impending jail sentence.

The "notes on a scandal" of the title refers to the account of the affair written by Barbara Covett. Barbara is a fellow schoolteacher, a spinster who is atrociously lonely, and who is also - apparently - Sheba's most loyal friend. Barbara is the kind of woman - snide, snippy, and a self-righteous old gossip - who you'd avoid like the plague in real life, but actually as a narrator she's rather delightful company, digging right into the salacious heart of the scandal on behalf of the reader. She's curiously self-deluding on occasion, but at other times she manages to nail the people around her with such brilliant precision that you can't help but be impressed. She's wickedly funny, and at other times is heartrending as she constantly confronts the haunting fact of her own crushing loneliness. This, is turns out, is why she is so loyal to Sheba: she needs Sheba, she has to feel that she has someone giving meaning to her life, and she'll do just about anything to keep her. Sheba hands this extraordinary power to Barbara when she tells her about her affair with Connolly, and her confession proves to be something of an incendiary. Barbara can, depending on her mood, either put it quietly and safely to one side or light the fuse, put her fingers in her ears and stand well back ...

There are some faults with the novel, certainly: the character of Barbara comes perilously close to being a cliché (she even has a pet cat that she dotes on, just as stereotypical lonely old spinsters everywhere are said to have). Also, Steven is made to sound rather repulsive - he has no obvious attractions, either physically, mentally or personality-wise - so it's rather hard to understand why Sheba is even attracted to him, let alone so obsessed that she'll risk everything for his sake.


Still, those faults are more like minor niggles than fatal flaws. This is a compelling, quick read - I got through it in about three evenings, and couldn't wait to get home and pick it up again. By turns funny and grim, it will draw you in and make you question some of your assumptions. I don't think Heller expects you to draw any profound moral from it; it's more of a dissection of the dynamics and power-struggles of personal and sexual relations, and an examination of societal and personal responses to sexual scandals. Read and enjoy. show less

In the US, this was published as "What Was She Thinking?", with "Notes on a Scandal" in brackets, as a subtitle.

Having just read Lolita (see my review HERE), I thought it would be interesting to read a more modern take on such a difficult subject, albeit with sexes reversed.

It's the story of Sheba, a married middle-class middle-aged pottery teacher who has an affair with a 15 year old pupil.

It is told by Barbara, a sixty-ish spinster who teaches in the same school, in a voice that could easily have been written by Alan Bennett - except that she's far nastier than any protagonist of his.

Innocence - and Not

Unlike Humbert in Lolita, there is no premeditation on the part of the Sheba; instead she succumbs through weakness (not that show more that's a justification) and excitement. In many ways she is the most childlike character, having married very young and been babied to some extent ever since, first by her husband and more recently by the manipulative Barbara.

Although Steven is a victim, he is also sexually assertive (as Humbert claims Lolita is), and Sheba is prey to both him and Barbara (described as a succubus, by Sheba's husband). The fact that Sheba started going out with her husband when he was her lecturer perhaps makes her feel it's not crossing such a big boundary for her to have a sexual relationship with Steven.

Compared with Lolita and others

Lolita was a child, a victim of rape as well as psychological abuse. Stephen, too. They are unquestionably victims of abuse by adults.

It's precisely because they are not passive, not conventionally pure or innocent (not that we can trust Humbert's account), that these are troubling and intriguing books. Both children are allegedly sexually experienced (possibly from abuse by other adults) before they meet the protagonists of these stories, and both apparently seek out and try to seduce their abusers. That absolutely does not justify the adults succumbing to that, but it does create a complex and twisted scenario for readers to judge. And we never get either story from the child's point of view.

Having a male victim of an older woman also changes the dynamic. See also John Banville's Ancient Light (my review is HERE), in which an aging man fondly remembers a teenage fling with a friend's mother.

For another slant of the young girl/older man, there's Marguerite Duras' autobiographical The Lover, set in 1929 Vietnam, which I reviewed HERE.

Amanda's comment, highlighting "toxic female friendship" made me realise this links intriguingly to Atwood's brilliant Cat's Eye, which I reviewed HERE.

Who is the Power?

Although the headline relationship is between Sheba and Steven, it is arguably that of Barbara and Sheba that is more twisted and exploitative. Barbara thinks she is lonely and that Sheba is insensitive to that, but Sheba is at least as lonely in a different way, and not as self-centred. Barbara wheedles her way into Sheba's life, with clear, but implicit Sapphic undertones, and loves the reflected glory of being friends with an attractive family.

She subsequently relishes her disgust and revels in the power of secrets. Even when the story breaks in the press, Barbara still gets a vicarious kick out of the scandal and her place in it.

Overall, a fascinating book, with lots to think about. show less

Notes on a Scandal is dark and scandalous!
Lonely spinster Barbara Covett is nearing retirement as a history teacher at St George’s when vivacious Bathsheba Hart joins the staff as a newbie art teacher. As their friendship blossoms the obsessive side of their nature unfurls with dramatic consequences.
Barbara and Sheba are an unlikely pairing. Stand-offish, scathing Barbara has a rigid routine, lives within her meagre means and has only Portia the cat for company. Magnetic, mesmerising Sheba is married with two children, upbeat and naive, spontaneous and well off.
Yet both are driven by an irrational obsession.
Both are unlikeable, unreliable, unpredictable and calculating.
Notes on a Scandal is really well written. The characterisation show more of 15-year old, special needs student Steve Connolly, Bangs the totally weird Maths teacher and the ghastly Pabblem, St George’s Headteacher, are scarily convincing.
Funny and brutal, creepy and disturbing, and well worth a read. show less

This is a tight glimpse into the worlds of two women caught in a scandal. A high school teacher is discovered to have been having sex with her 17 year old pupil, bringing complete ruination to her career, her marriage, and her social world. Facing legal consequences, she is befriended by an older teacher who narrates the story. This narrator's life and motivations are evoked indirectly (she is somewhat unaware of her own motives or how she is perceived by others). The characterization of the narrator is particularly acute

I wasn't certain I was going to like this book when I began it. It starts out in the present tense, a conceit that I generally dislike. However, it soon changes, as the author alternates tenses to differentiate between the narration of past and present events. And then it works.

The story is of a forty-ish school teacher who has an affair with one of her students, and is told by a sixty-ish school teacher who has befriended her. As the book starts, the affair has already been discovered and Sheba is out on bail pending trial, living in her brother's home with her friend Barbara. Barbara is writing a journal about the events and her relationship with Sheba, and that is how the story unfolds.

All of Heller's characters are realistic, from show more the inarticulate 15-year-old with a crush on his teacher, to the teacher herself, new at the job, anxious to do good and make good, to her rebellious teen-aged daughter, to the pompous headmaster and the spinster friend. It is the character of Barbara, however, who is most interesting, despite the rather stereotypical "repressed lesbian spinster with cat" image. She is very clever, dead on with her analysis of other people and their actions, yet totally oblivious to her own inappropriate behavior and full of self-justification. She is at once sympathetic, and not sympathetic, a very neat stunt to pull off!

The same is true of Sheba. The knee-jerk reaction is to think, well, she should have known better than to have it off with a student. But the situation is far more complicated than that. As Barbara muses, "The sorts of young people who become involved in this kind of imbroglio are usually pretty wily about sexual matters. I don't mean just that they're sexually experienced -- although that is often the case. I mean that they possess some instinct, some natural talent, for sexual power play. For various reasons, our society has chosen to classify people under the age of sixteen as children. In most of the rest of the world, boys and girls are understood to become adults somewhere around the age of twelve. . .We may have very good reasons for choosing to prolong the privileges and protections of childhood. But at least let us acknowledge what we are up against when attempting to enforce that extension. Connolly was officially a minor, and Sheba's actions were, officially speaking, exploitative; yet any honest assessment of their relationship would have to acknowledge not only that Connolly was acting of his own volition but that he actually wielded more power in the relationship than Sheba." That is often the case.

A very good read. show less

i tried to read this more for the character study of the narrator than anything else, so i ended up liking it better by the end than when i started. (also the ending is excellent.) for probably the first 50 pages or more, i hated this book. the narrator is absolutely insufferable and it was a real struggle to be anywhere near her head.

i really don't like this book, but heller does do some interesting things that give me pause, and make me think. (which obviously is a strong positive.)

the most sympathetic character, as written, in the book is sheba, which is interesting because she's a 41 year old teacher "having an affair" with her 15 year old student. probably in actuality the most sympathetic characters are her husband and son, and show more possibly her daughter (although she seems just awful). but we're in the narrator's head and can't really trust her evaluation of the people in the book, as she hates everyone and everything in her loneliness and solitude. but because barbara, the narrator, wants us to see sheba in a good light, we more or less do. in spite of what she's doing.

this is theoretically a story about a teacher unravelling her life as she "has an affair" with this child. it's theoretically ambiguous (except of course it's not) in that we are shown the boy to be the sexual aggressor and not that sheba is actively pursuing this boy for a "relationship." so we are probably supposed to wonder who is the predator here. but really it's a story about the narrator being the predator and sheba being the prey. from the beginning we see how barbara stalks people, watches them, judges them, connives and manipulates relationships. she doesn't want to be alone, and she finds in sheba someone naive and trusting enough to be susceptible to her. and she ends up in charge and with someone who relies on her by the end. (although since sheba'll end up in prison i'm not sure how well this ends up working out for her.) so really barbara is the predator and sheba is the prey. this is a nice, and even deft, misdirection of focus and morality, but it's not enough to make this a good book in my mind. show less