London via Oxford

What faint traces keep us harnessed to our own lives, unable to wander off and inhabit the lives of others,” muses the narrator of The Lessons, Naomi Alderman’s second novel. The reflection is apposite for him: James is a lower-middle-class boy, aspiring to a life more intense than the one he has known. At Oxford, amid a group of wealthy fellow undergraduates, he finds it.
So far, so Brideshead Revisited — especially since the group revolves around a fabulously wealthy, Catholic, homosexual young man, Mark, whose character possesses all the conflict those adjectives might suggest. Mark has been largely brought up by his mother, a crazy and beautiful Italian woman named Isabella, who periodically appears in his life as an agent of disorder, unpacking tissuepaper-wrapped presents, and packing shopping into her valises like a latter-day Zuleika Dobson. Alderman’s readable , fast-paced story is full of echoes of other novels: Brideshead, some of Waugh’s more savagely comic novels , and L P Hartley’s plaintive, morose The Go-Between .
The flamboyant, somewhat unstable Mark invites James, James’s musician girlfriend Jess, a glamorous Spanish girl called Emmanuella, and the more English Simon and Franny to live with him, rent-free , in his sprawling but dilapidated mansion in Oxford while they are students. This puts them outside the normal undergraduate life, which is replaced with a form of decadence supported by Mark’s money. Fortnum and Mason delivers; champagne is drunk; parties are held. Meanwhile Oxford continues, callous and largely indifferent to the fate of its undergraduates . Alderman’s dons are caricatures , a little too consistently fruity and unsympathetic to be credible, and the observations she makes about the university are sometimes bizarrely wide-eyed .
When our characters move to London and real life, the novel becomes much crisper. James and Jess move in together; Simon and Franny break up; Emmanuella moves back to Spain; Mark, in an unexpected move, marries Simon’s seventeen-year-old sister and has a child. All, of course, will not be well for long, and it’s when the cracks start appearing that the plot tightens, the prose becomes crisper, and the novel comes into focus. By the end, the novel elegantly refuses to draw few lessons, in fact, from the preceding years, and it’s the shadowy, unsatisfied narrator, James, who holds a reader’s interest, rather than the elusive, slightly clichéd Mark.