I’ll be discussing Scarlett Thomas’ riotously enjoyable new novel Oligarchy with her at the wonderful Second Shelf bookshop. Her blackly comic novel set in a girls' boarding school satirises the hysteria of the diet industry, Instagram and young women's behaviour but it is not without heart. The Times has said of Oligarchy: “Wickedly funny … Thomas has great fun with the familiar components of the boarding school yarn, even as she subverts them. Her writing is spikily humorous and controlled … This jet-black novel begs to be dramatised”. We will be discussing excess and appetite and how Scarlett managed to make Oligarchy so hilarious and compelling at the same time. There will be a short reading by Scarlett from Oligarchy. There will also be time for audience questions and for Scarlett to sign copies of Oligarchy which will be on sale on the evening.
Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.
