Review: On The Wall

On the Wall by Anne Fine (Old Barn Books, 2024)

If Virginia Woolf had ever produced something for children, the result might have been along the lines of Anne Fine’s new book, On the Wall. Here, there’s a curious central character, Finlay, who for most of the book we see from without. Dreaming, wondering, a philosophical presence sitting up ‘on the wall’, this new boy to the school, fresh from the local primary into Year 7, says he is doing nothing, thinking nothing, though just by being there his influence upon those who are drawn into his orbit is powerful enough to alter their views of things.

The book is structured around the three terms of the school year. Fine has an innate understanding of how this ‘year’ works - there is the getting-to-know-you part at the start, then the more comfortable weeks of the Spring term, and then, suddenly, the grand finale of the end of year where minds are very much set on the imminent ‘moving on’ and all its associated excitement and apprehension.

Not since Gene Kemp’s ‘Cricklepit’ series has there been a more truthful ‘fictionalising’ of school life;  in the day-to-day routines and variations, of course, but also in those who inhabit the corridors on a daily basis. Finley’s class - as with every class, a microcosm of the huge variety of human society and nature - gradually reveals each of their own private worries and obsessions. When shared with Finley, these seem to take on new existences: they are not the same worries, obsessions - or even children! - that they were before: Finley’s detachment has a cooling air of clarity; he is able to put things in perspective just by being there, doing his thing ‘on the wall’. 

Through the course of the book, the eye is both on the children but also, more unusually perhaps, on the teachers, whose commentaries from the staff room punctuate the unfolding narrative elsewhere. (Their lives, again like those of Kemp’s Cricklepit staff, are only lightly sketched in; but lives they do have - the staff are real people, not cardboard cut-outs.) Individual staff members offer takes on the new boy that range from indifference to bafflement - ironic perhaps that these are the ‘teachers’, doubly so when in preparing for a school concert it’s the children who, quite unassuming, demonstrate their partial understanding of what Finley is capable of. But ultimately no-one really knows. Fine herself expresses her astonishment in the Afterword that even she didn’t realise that Fin carried a mobile phone until, unplanned, there it was, set down on the page in black and white.

Fine establishes key moments in the narrative with a surface artificiality that bring us, the readers, under the same spell. There is a scene early on, for example, where the class are taken to an art gallery and, to the teacher’s astonishment - and ours - the spotlight falls on Finlay and, one by one as if in a play, the other children are drawn from the shadows of the rest of the stage to join him in the centre. The effect is startlingly theatrical, and illuminates the inner lives of the children, their dialogue running fluidly in a corporate stream of consciousness. Their art teacher stands amazed. It is an unsettling moment, but a very beautiful one, too.  

Many will find On the Wall a very different experience to reading most other school stories. Just as Mrs Dalloway is hardly a story about a shopping trip, so sensitive readers of On the Wall will find new depths in the unnoticeable rhythms of our school day experiences, all the way accompanied by the wonder that is Finley.

Anne Fine's On the Wall was published by Old Barn Books on 5th September and is available from all good bookshops.