This smart, funny, topical school novel is set over one lunch break

FICTION
In a Common Hour
Sita Walker
Ultimo, $35

There are debut novels that tend to be undercooked, not quite ready to face the ferocious light of publication. Fortunately, In a Common Hour is remarkably poised for a first fiction and feels like the work of a hand much more experienced. Before the reader even enters its pages, you note that Sita Walker has partially dedicated the book “for every state high school teacher in Queensland”.

Walker’s been a teacher herself for over two decades, but this book is not a memoir based on a scattering of real people; Walker’s already done that in The God of No Good, released three years ago. While that effort concentrated on her matriarchal lineage, this imaginative creation is borne from a pastiche of characters and situations that have flitted through the author’s own educational career.

What happens when a titillating photo of a respected teacher is posted in the school’s group chat (that’s accessible to the public at large) is the pivot of the novel. Fifty-something Paul Bush is an English and history teacher who works at Park High. He’s a mild-mannered dreamy type who’s teary when reciting Neruda poems to his class, but an incriminating photo of him taken by a vengeful student exposes a fault line in his otherwise inoffensive exterior.

Moving deftly back and forth in time, Walker introduces us to a group of senior students and educators as the fallout ripples across the community. Her character portraits of the outlier misfits and the stressed teachers are both insightful and empathetic. There’s the ironically named principal Freedom Cook, for instance, forever at the mercy of the Parents’ and Citizens’ Association and therefore unable to run her school with autonomy, and who describes her role as “warden of a glorified prison”.

She dreams of living like a hermit instead of shepherding over 2000 unruly students. The non-sequitur dialogue of the adolescents also thrums with verisimilitude (Walker credits her sons for her characters speaking “fluent teenage boy”.)

A raft of social issues are explored not only in contemporary Australian public schools (overcrowding and underfunding, pupil insolence, teacher burnout) but also throughout the wider society (mental health, fractured families, poverty, spousal violence, generational abuse, teenage pregnancy). Pointedly however, it’s the ubiquitous use of mobile phones and social media (and their attendant misuses and toxicity) that situate this novel squarely in contemporary times.

Positioned next to the school is 600 hectares of eucalypt forest used as a retreat for solace and escape by everyone at Park High. This bushland is another character in the book, its flora and fauna lyrically incorporated as major players in the narrative.

The big storm that erupts at the end brings the various plot strands to a satisfying climax. That there are connections between seemingly disparate characters is subtly and gradually made evident without over-explication, so readers can fill in the gaps themselves.

Walker took her title from a quote by American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. It’s a hopeful one, and for all its excursions into grim corners and observations of frailties and vulnerabilities, the novel is suffused with a spirituality that lightens the darkness and reminds us of a greater realm than the minutiae of the human condition.

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