Notes on a Scandal

I recommend this book as often as I can. Edgier and more disturbing than the film adaptation, Heller’s novel offers not one but two women doing terrible things.

Sheba is the art instructor hiding her illicit meetings with a student and running around like a teenager in what must be one of recent literature’s more reprehensible midlife crises. Barbara is the cynical older woman, the veteran teacher with a busy schedule and a barren personal life.

Sheba appeals to Barbara as a friend, to keep her secret. Barbara responds with feigned concern, then with affection, desire, jealousy, and a malicious… show more.

A real classic, leaving Heller fans in frustration, longing for her to match this achievement. The rank stupidity of the teacher, Sheba’s, affair with a perfectly mundane male pupil – while she has a marriage and children – is perversely enjoyable. But it’s the older female narrator’s warped obsession with Sheba, her desire to control her, to possess her life, that forms the really fascinating and highly ill-advised relationship. 

I own this book in multiple formats and re-visit it frequently, because reading it is like taking a writing class; the subtlety of the mask-off moments of its troubled narrator are so deftly drawn. And she’s so truly terrifying because she believes she’s done nothing wrong! A retired teacher drafts out a manuscript about how her beautiful and disgraced colleague sexually preyed on a student at their school while living with her before the trial. The teacher-student scandal is not for the squeamish, and the dynamic between the two teachers is so harrowing this could legitimately be shelved as horror. 

I first read this story of a friendship between an older and a younger woman years ago and it has stayed with me. The relationship appears to be supportive, but it is actually manipulative and dangerous. It’s a creepy and compelling tale of who not to trust, but it also gave me much food for thought in terms of morality. Who did I side with? The unstable older teacher or the one having an affair with an under-aged pupil?

I love an unreliable narrator, and Barbara Covett is the best of the best. A repressed, embittered history teacher at a school for disadvantaged students in London, Barbara is contemptuous of her pupils and colleagues alike, until classy, idealistic art teacher Sheba comes along. When Sheba begins an affair with a fifteen-year-old student, Barbara becomes her confidante and enabler. While the teacher-student relationship and its fallout make for addictive reading, Barbara’s psyche is the star of the novel, and her toxic ‘friendship’ with Sheba is equal parts sinister and revealing of her deep loneliness.