A Review of Christopher J. Yates’ “Black Chalk”
Play the Game
I went a year without reading a book, and I missed out on a few things. (That’s a year of book loving that I don’t get back, after all.) I got sent a few galleys from publishers, mostly Picador, but I never got around to reading any of them. I’ve decided to give them a go, even if the books are now a little old. For one things, books tend to have a much longer shelf life than music, for instance, and a good book is a good book, regardless of the year in which it has been published. So I decided to sit down with Christopher J. Yates’ Black Chalk, and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a pretty great read, albeit one with some problems.
Black Chalk was originally published in Britain in 2013, and while it never made its way originally to American shores, independent book stores in the States started getting the odd copy and heartily recommending it to readers. A few US publications also gave it some good recommendations, and I suppose that was enough for Picador to decide to pick it up in 2015. The book is one with multiple plot twists — some ingenious and some insipid — and anyone interested in psychological thrillers might want to read this.
The book alternates between Oxford University in 1990 and New York City some 14 years later. In the former part of the story, six students decide to play a new game that they’ve invented, simply known as the Game. Basically, while Yates provides few details as to the mechanics of the Game (which is odd because he’s worked as a puzzle editor), the consequences for losing each round is that each person has to do a truly embarrassing thing, such as being caught wanking off in a public washroom. None of these consequences are illegal to do, but they’re designed to cause discomfort. They also increase in severity as the Game progresses. All six players lay out a deposit, and the Game is hosted by a gaming society that adds money to the pot and seemingly control things behind the scenes. However, things eventually go wrong, and one of the players dies.
That might sound a little Battle Royale or Hunger Games-esque, and you’d be right. The only difference here is that the stakes seem lower and the body count is nowhere near as high. The book does keep you guessing most of the way as to who actually died, as the narrator, it turns out, is highly unreliable. That narrator tells the story from New York, but it turns out that he is a bit of a shut-in, relying on medications and memory tricks to get through life. The Game, it turns out, has greatly impacted him.
The book is great at keeping you on your toes, even though I managed to guess some of the twists and turns. The novel is also great in terms of being a coming of age story between university-aged youth, and how friendships form and how they can be broken over the stupidest, littlest things. Black Chalk also has its share of romance, and the subject is just how tenuous love really is. There’s a great deal of depth to the novel, and that’s what makes it such a fun and exhilarating read.
The thing is, few of the things in the Game really feel embarrassing or high stakes. One of the consequences is giving a speech while drunk, but the author makes feeling drunk to be far more mind inducing than it actually is — making you wonder if the author ever did take a drink in his life. However, it could just well be that these things feel quaint because American (or Canadian readers, in my case) just don’t have to deal with the class distinctions that Britons do, and some of these things may actually be truly shameful in Great Britian. It may be, as well, that the book simply feels low stakes after you’ve read the other aforementioned books (or seen their movies), and wonder what the big deal really is. After all, none of the consequences ask you to put your life on the line in the way that the game of The Hunger Games asks you to do.
I also found the final twists to be surprising and compelling — something out of a Christopher Nolan movie, really — but I also didn’t fully understand them. There are a few plot threads left dangling, thanks in no small part to that unreliable narrator, such as what role did the Gaming Society really have in the Game and why were they first interested in it in the first place. What sort of games were they playing before some of the six students approached them with the idea? How would a society like this function at a place such as Oxford? Wouldn’t someone eventually find them out?
That all aside, the book does paint a nice picture of what it’s like to attend an upper crust school in Britain. I visited Oxford in 2005 for a day, and found that some of the details, such as the wisteria growing on the sides of buildings, to be true and in line with my memories. I found the characters to be appealing, even when they were grating on each other’s (and the reader’s) nerves, and really felt that the way the book was constructed was nicely done.
All in all, Black Chalk reads like a first novel — with some great things and some bad things. I think the good far outweighed the bad, and found the book to be quite cinematic — I wonder what it’d be like if this book was turned into a movie. It would probably be a fairly riveting one, if the stakes got raised a bit higher. Black Chalk is an emotionally gripping and somewhat satisfying read. It comes recommended, and I’m just sorry that it took me this long to get around to it. There’s plenty to absorb with this book, and the ending will give you the feel of losing some best friends, and navigating the twists and turns is an experience in and of itself. If you haven’t been spoiled with other books or movies about deadly things going wrong with students, you’ll probably really enjoy this book. Ignorance, sometimes, can be bliss after all.
Christopher J. Yates’ Black Chalk was published by Picador on August 4, 2015.
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