The Exclusives - Rebecca Thornton

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As Dickon Edwards wrote in The Diary of an Antibody, 'Thank God we only have to survive school at the beginning of our lives - there's no way we'd survive it later'. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, but the contrast between adolescent resilience and adult frailty is demonstrated in the twin narrative strands of The Exclusives. In both strands, one set in 1996, the other in 2014, Josephine Grey is forced to confront immense psychological pressures connected to her best friend Freya, and her mentally ill mother. As a teenager, bolstered by her status as Head Girl at an exclusive boarding school, she is able to survive at the expense of her peers; as an adult, she comes perilously close to crumbling.

Late adolescence is a defining time, a period of experimentation mixed with ‘a feeling of dread and change’.  Decisions made under the influence of hormones and recreational drugs can define our futures, and one-off events can become form patterns which will recur throughout our lives. Even if we survive, we can't escape the after-effects of our youths. This is the subject of The Exclusives, a boarding school novel with a hint of The Secret History.
 

Josephine has her life planned out for her: head girl at a prestigious boarding school, through Oxford and into a high-powered career. She is the epitome of the all-business, high-achieving student, until a night out with Freya turns horribly wrong; the events of that night, and the girls’ reaction to them, casts a shadow over the rest of her life. The girls wake up with hazy memories, but physical evidence of what happened is everywhere; their bodies are 'filthy, streaked with black', and Freya's skirt retains the smell of 'smoke, CK One and something else; a slightly soury, metallic smell with damp undertones that hits the back of my throat and makes me panic'.

Rather than confronting what happened, as Freya craves, Josephine insists on carrying on as if nothing occurred, fearing that any revelation will damage her chances of attaining an Oxford scholarship. For Freya, the signs of trauma are external: self-harm, erratic behaviour, a wild appearance. Josephine, by contrast, doubles down, isolating herself from others and attempting to manipulate events from behind the scenes, in order to protect her position of influence. The steps she takes to ensure Freya’s silence lead to an even greater scandal, which brings their entire school’s reputation into question, along with their own. Eighteen years on, Josephine is on an archaeological dig in Jordan when she is contacted out of the blue by Freya. The unexpected return of her friend sends Josephine into a spiral of doubt and paranoia which drives the modern-day strand of the narrative.

 

While Josephine is a fairly dislikeable protagonist, it is worth paying attention to her role models, and the ideology which has shaped her life. Her school is a factory for producing high-achieving borderline sociopaths. The Greenwood Hall girl, we are told, is defined by her 'righteous manner, loyalty to the school and well... achievement'. The morning after the night out with Freya, Josephine quotes the school's motto, Per Asprerrimus ad Parnassum: 'remember, I'm Head Girl and you're a prefect. We are both taking our Oxbridge entries soon, and we've got to get on with things'. Her father, a Permanent Secretary to John Major and David Cameron, teaches her that the consequences of her actions can be overridden by influence: 'you just make this go away’, he tells her, when the school governors try to shame her into confessing her role in the scandal, ‘you make your own history'. So it is no wonder that she turns into Gollum on receipt of the Head Girl badge.  

Her character is deepened by her relationship to her mother. While her father is a strong, if somewhat distant, figure in her life, her mother represents something more chaotic. A schizophrenic, she spends time in institutions, and is a disruptive presence in the house when she is home. The excessive control Josephine exhibits is an attempt to ensure that she does not follow in her mother’s path. In death, Josephine's mother continues to exert an influence, as writings found among her effects heighten Josephine's fears of succumbing to the same illness. 

The dual structure of the narrative, with chapters alternating between 1996 and 2014, allows the reader to draw parallels between the two periods, and see how Josephine’s present is influenced by her past. The plotting is tight, and although The Exclusives doesn’t have the visceral emotional pitch of a novel like Special by Bella Bathurst, Thornton ensures that the reader is engaged to the end, and is keen to see how both plot strands pan out.