The School of Night: A Novel

by Alan Wall

Overview

Sean Tallow has only two overriding desires in life. One is to step into the shoes of his glamorous friend Daniel Pagett, and the other is to establish the truth about the School of Night, a shadowy group of Elizabethans who clustered around Sir Walter Ralegh.

Tallow pursues the School of Night and its entanglement in the question of whether the man from Stratford-on-Avon could really have written the plays ascribed to William Shakespeare. If he didn't, then who did? The harder he studies, the less light is thrown on this troublesome question, and the more his interest in the School of Night becomes a grim fixation.

Just when it seems Tallow is ready to give up the quest, day becomes night and everything he once believed is turned on its head as he enters a fearful world where there are no longer any rules except survival. Like the original members of the School of Night, he finds himself treading on the wrong side of the law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466829138
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/07/2003
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	332 KB

About the Author

Alan Wall was born in Yorkshire and educated at Oxford. He is the author of several novels including Bless the Thief.

Alan Wall was born in Yorkshire and educated at Oxford. He is the author of several novels, including The Lightning Cage, The School of Night and Bless the Thief. He currently lives in Wales.

Editorial Reviews

Part scholarly mystery, part thriller, this novel grips the reader from the opening moment when its narrator, BBC editor Sean Tallow, steals two Elizabethan-era tomes from a university library. In the Hariot Notebooks, as they are called, he hopes to find reference to the enigmatic School of Night, a group of Elizabethans possibly including George Chapman, the writer who obliquely hinted at its existence, and the charismatic adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Tallow is convinced Hariot will furnish proof not only of the existence of the school but will also reveal which of the group's members was the real author of the plays commonly believed to have been written by William Shakespeare. As Sean examines the manuscript, he must also come to terms with the death of his childhood friend, Daniel Pagett (always referred to as "dear dead Dan"), who Sean hero-worshiped for many years. Dan did not make it into Oxford with Sean, but went on to amass a fortune and marry Sean's high school sweetheart. After 20 years of study, Tallow is ready to award the authorship to Christopher Marlowe (a favorite of Shakespeare conspiracy theorists), deciding that Marlowe's death in a fight at a bar was actually staged, and that he escaped to Italy, where he wrote the famous plays. In a stunning and unexpected climax, Dan's fate is revealed to be linked to Sean's investigations. Readers familiar with the underworld of debate swirling around Shakespeare's oeuvre won't be surprised by the theories bandied about here, but they should enjoy the tale nonetheless. Agent, Gill Coleridge. (Mar. 19) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

An independent scholar has an obsessive interest in the mysteries of Shakespeare's identity, and the eponymous Elizabethan society somehow related to him. Protagonist Sean Tallow works as a news editor for the BBC-until a cost-cutting decision sends him reeling through a succession of unfulfilling jobs and unresolved relationships with women, then a reunion with his boyhood friend Dan Pagett, a no-nonsense business tycoon who's always been loftily amused by Sean's stubborn bookishness. Wall (Bless the Thief, 1998) works hard at making connections between the intrigues that Dan involves Sean in (largely consisting of illegally circumventing customs regulations). But the most interesting parts of the story are those in which Sean uncovers information about the "School of Night" briefly mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost: an "underground" group of intellectuals whose members included poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, scientist and mathematician Thomas Hariot, and that fascinating, tragic polymath Dr. John Dee (who might be considered the Elizabethan Aristotle). There's authentic mystery in the buried facts about "this glittering cohort of human daring and folly," self-proclaimed Faustian seekers who had abjured the company of women and devoted themselves to understanding all the secrets of the universe. Wall keeps us interested in Sean Tallow primarily because Tallow is interested in these people, and keeps stumbling onto such delicious possibilities as the suggestion that "King Lear was effectively a coded treatise on the subject of alchemy." The novel's contemporary plot-albeit intermittently enlivened by adultery, smuggling, murder, and malicious satire on academic andbig-business posturing-pales by comparison (though Wall does make several intriguing climactic linkages between Dan Pagett's bluff amorality and Sean Tallow's entrapment in his very own "Jacobean tragedy"). Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh author's fiction will eventually arrive Over Here.

Kirkus Reviews