Notes on a Scandal

It is not hard to see why Zoë Heller's second novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003: it is a precise and in parts hilarious account of a relationship between Sheba, a pottery teacher at a north London school, and Connolly, one of her students, but what lifts the book above its tawdry and not unfamiliar storyline is the voice of the narrator, Barbara.

Barbara is one of Sheba's colleagues, an older single woman who has taught at the school for many years. Her prickliness and fixed opinions have not endeared her to her staffroom colleagues, including the head teacher, with whom she converses in tones of barely disquised contempt. When the inexperienced Sheba, all floaty dresses and flyaway hair, begins at the school Barbara decides to take her under her wing, sensing that the pupils will make mincemeat of her.

As their relationship develops, Barbara becomes a not entirely welcome part of Sheba's family; her proximity to Sheba means that she is able to see - and warn against - the flowering of the potentially destructive, not to say illegal, affair between her friend and Connolly. As the intensity of the affair between teacher and student increases, Barbara is ideally placed to become Sheba's confidante and support…

Heller cleverly lets Barbara unwittingly reveal to the reader more about herself than about the lovers. She is a bitter, lonely person whose fixed views do her no credit, and, if she is a little creepy, she is not an entirely unsympathetic character. If the descriptions of Sheba's family lean perilously close to caricature, there is no doubting the awfulness of the situation they find themselves in. Conversely, it is hard for the reader to resist that frisson of schadenfraude as the book reaches its conclusion.

Notes on a Scandal is a cleverly controlled and meticulously constructed novel, by turns funny and cringing.