Right from the start of this book we know that we are only getting part of the picture. We know there's something happening but we don't know what it is. Carers, donors, privileged estates, Hailsham....When we go back into our narrator's past, we find Hailsham to be a boarding school, or something very like one. The casual cruelty of children, being 'in' with the right people, the cult of particular teachers, the importance of particular belongings, rules...
"... how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning."
But there is also a strange foreboding and the appearance of leading a normal childhood blows away like feathers from the wings of Icarus. And what strange England is this in which they land?
This is a philosophical fable which can be read in many different ways. My only reservation was that there was too much of the actual world for there to be so little.
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