Sophie Gee

And by the time we get to Heinz, it's become a mechanised coal mining landscape in the North.

Oh, totally amazing.

I highlighted that passage too.

It's unforgettable when you get to it.

All right.

Now, speaking of unforgettable, Jonty, I think we need to go to the kind of the rhetorical tour de force in this novel, which is the headmaster Grice's monologue about a third of the way through.

And I think that this kind of sums up the school environment for us.

So do you want to introduce Grice's monologue?

I totally agree.

And actually just to underscore that, because it's one of the things about this novel that gets us away from Dickens, which tends to kind of bifurcate characters into goodies and baddies and the winners and the losers, the masters and the students and so on.

I think Hines is really interrupting that, actually.

I mean, it's in Tom Brown's School Days as well.

I think Hines is really interrupting that.

And what we're looking at here, I didn't find Grice as unsympathetic a character as you did, actually.

And nor did I find the PE teacher as ridiculous as a character as...

He can be because I think one of the things we're seeing here is a whole social system, a whole kind of social ecosystem that has been pulled under by this mining economy in the north of England and the way that it is treated nationally.

extractively and carelessly by the government in Westminster and by other forms of power and authority in Britain.

I think we're looking at a whole society that is irreparably damaged or at least irreparably disadvantaged by the reality of where they live and the industry that sort of fuels them.

So they're all kind of trapped, goodies or baddies.

They're all part of the system.