When the Whistle Blows

February 25, 2002
Set in inner-city Bristol, this black comedy is an anarchic, scathing indictment of the educational establishment and national curriculum in England. Imagine a humorous Clockwork Orange
set in the classroom, and you'll have a good idea of the havoc wreaked in this comic and disturbing novel. Caleb Duck is head of the Integrated Studies Department, which is full of students who are "thieves, arsonists, prostitutes and rapists." Caleb, the bizarre antihero, conducts a surreal uprising with his Camp Escape Committee, fueled on drugs supplied by his 15-year-old second-in-command, Errol, "a huge, princely looking Afro-Caribbean lad" with underworld ties. Caleb's devious and entirely loony plan is to put his students' criminal talent to good use, and he forges a regime that is part Lord of the Flies,
part Caligula's Rome, centered around the excavation of a tunnel under the school's sports field. Sprinkled throughout the book are bureaucratic memos, forms, questionnaires and paperwork, functioning as the deadpan backdrop for the novel's violent scenes and grotesque dialogue. American readers may have some trouble comprehending Allen's Briticisms (not to mention following the hallucinogenic narrative), and the language and scenes (pornography, orgies, overdoses and bloody beatings) are harrowing and extreme, but the message about the quality and state of education is real and legitimate.