Title: The Divines Author: Ellie Eaton
Published: January 19, 2021
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 320
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn’t spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.
Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school’s scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self.
Ellie Eaton’s The Divines is well-written and engaging, but it suffers from something of an identity crisis. Is it an imitator of the “Dark Academia” classic, The Secret History? Is it a bleak exposé on the toxic world of ultra-elite British boarding schools? Is it a coming-of-age novel? Or, more confusingly, is it a story in which a school bully gets a redemption arc? The Divines is none of these books, and a great deal of the narrative’s bulk is wasted as the author tries to resolve on a definitive purpose.
I’m willing to grant that the author had a clear vision mind, but my concern is that whatever the point of all of this was, it wasn’t properly conveyed. The Divines flounders messily as it attempts to rise out of the soup of its own potential.
The book starts off promisingly enough. In the opening chapters, Eaton establishes her setting: the unspeakably toffish school of St. John the Divine in Oxfordshire—famous not so much for its academics as its capability of churning out trophy wives. We also meet 16-year-old Josephine (“Joe”), an awkward, skinny girl who desperately wants to fit in with her peers, and is obsessed with others’ perception of her. In spite of her wealth, status, and undeniable brains, Joe is lonely and a bit depressed. Her paranoia over ostracization is worsened when, at the start of a new term, she’s assigned a new roommate, Gerry, whose lower class origins and intense persona have rendered her the butt of Fifth Form’s merciless jokes.
Young Joe is a sympathetic character, as she is meant to be. The reader feels sorry for her as she tries to navigate the toxic environment of Divine, and the reader commiserates with the way her unpopular roommate affects Joe’s own social prospects. But there’s a catch. As with the more famous The Secret History, Eaton opens her novel with a grim scene in which Gerry’s apparently lifeless body is found by the Fifth Form girls, who—being over-privileged sociopaths—laugh it off and fail to alert the headmistress/police.
So, right away, we know there’s a dead body. The Divines sets its stage to be a complex unraveling of how Gerry came to be killed, presumably by her classmates. But instead of focusing on Gerry, the book spends a great deal of time exploring our narrator Joe’s growing pains: her crush on one of the school’s maintenance workers and her unlikely friendship with the same maintenance worker’s “townie” sister. Perhaps feeling abandoned by her friends, Joe latches onto this family and becomes a frequent guest at their modest council house. While this was all interesting and insightful into Joe’s character, none of these scenes have anything to do with the all-important question: What Happened to Gerry?
Eaton doesn’t seem pressed to answer this question, or even to tease her readers by dropping hints. Not only does The Divines spend a great deal of time following Joe around on unrelated adventures, the book has a split narrative. The book hops back and forth between adolescent Joe, and “adult Joe”—who now goes by the nickname Sephine and is married to a charming himbo from rural Austria. Grown-up Joe, the reader finds out, has completely lost touch with everyone from Divine, and her own memories of the fateful weeks preceding Gerry’s accident are hazy at best. At first, the inclusion of Older Joe seems to make sense. With the distance of 15 years and several thousand miles, perhaps this version of Eaton’s protagonist would be the best person to make sense of things and help answer the important Gerry-related question (see above).
Unfortunately, as the portions of the novel about Younger Joe progress, they become darker and more uncomfortable. (I think the conceit here is that somewhere in the future, Older Joe is reckoning now with the memories she lost, but this isn’t as fully developed as it might have been.) Regardless, it becomes more and more apparent that Younger Joe was a frightful, toxic bully. The carefully curated initial presentation of this character—a young girl struggling with self-confidence and self-image—still holds true, but now there’s a layer of aggression, violence, and cruelty on top. The longer the book goes on, the more difficult it is to view Joe as the “protagonist” in any sense of the word. The reader begins to suspect not only that Gerry’s death was no accident, but that Joe had a large part to play in…well, whatever happens. We still don’t know What Happened to Gerry.
Meanwhile, as teenage Joe becomes more and more despicable, Older Joe is…what, exactly? By the second half of the book, the inclusion of the “present day” chapters feels more awkward and pointless with each passing paragraph. If The Divines wants to be a book with an unreliable narrator who was a school bully, then commit to it, by god! But showing a seemingly depressed, anxious adult Joe, who struggles to make meaningful human connections and balance her family life, seems like a cheap trick to keep the character sympathetic. I began to feel that the story was headed in the direction of a Redemption Arc, of eventual amends being made in some way (but how? one wonders—Gerry’s dead, after all). Which might be okay, but the story never gives a real sense that Joe has actually changed since her teen years; rather, she’s conveniently blocked off all memories of her poor behavior so she doesn’t have to reckon with her actions.
Eventually, Eaton cannot keep hiding the truth behind the curtain. In two separate scenes, we find out what happens to Gerry. First (and as expected), Joe’s cruelty to the clearly unhappy girl comes to a head, and during a struggle in their room, Gerry is pushed out their third-floor window. Second, (and not expected), Gerry isn’t dead? Joe simply assumed that Gerry died after the fall, and then proceeded to go on and live the rest of her life without once looking into the matter, and, of course, she blocked off all her memories of that time period. Er…okay. That was a bit of a head-scratcher, but I’m fairly good at accepting poorly executed plot twists.
But now we arrive upon what I think the “actual” point of The Divines is: the fickleness of memory. At the outset, Joe clearly sees herself as something like a victim: an outcast, socially awkward, sexually inexperienced. Over time, Joe’s memories “return” to her, and while she never stops seeing herself as a victim, the narrative implicitly acknowledges that Joe was a bully, and that she and her classmates participated in frightful displays of vandalism, lawlessness, and violence. But then, Joe starts to reconnect with her former schoolmates, and we find out that their memories don’t match up with hers. To the other students at Divine, Joe was flawless, intimidating, beautiful. Everyone wanted to be Joe. She’s shocked to hear herself described thus—but even more shocked to learn that everyone has completely forgotten about Gerry and her fall. No one remembers.
Joe even goes so far as to reach out to Gerry, now a successful psychologist with a wife and two children. Joe apologizes, but Gerry waives it away—Gerry herself seems to have constructed a version of history that allows her to deny she was ever the victim of systematic abuse by her peers.
So at the end of it all, I have to wonder: why did I sit through this long recounting of Joe’s life? Am I meant to feel sorry for Joe? Am I meant to feel anything at all? Is The Divines an inverse murder mystery? Is it an extended commentary on the subjectivity of memory, using the British private school system as a plot vehicle? And what was the point of the entire sequence where Joe befriends the working-class “townie” family, loses her virginity to the much-older maintenance man/brother, and violently (homophobically) attacks the sister when she tries to kiss her? Make it all make sense!
As I said at the top of this review, I’m sure Ellie Eaton wanted to do something specific with this novel. However, The Divines is all over the place. If the narrative had been more focused, I think this could have been an excellent novel—particularly if the author had leaned into a more suspenseful Tartt-esque murdery plot. I’m not mad at The Divines, I’m just disappointed.
