This is truly one of the most boring books I've ever tried to read. I didn't even finish it. This is definitely one instance where the movie was better than the book. ( )

The slow decline into obsession is like a slow growing cancer. The sickness of the heart soon controls the soul. Barbara Covett's long teaching career at St. Georges School affords her a critical opinion of her colleagues, old and new. With barely any friends, scarce family ties, and no love life to speak of, Barbara is an aging spinster alone with an ailing cat. Such bitter loneliness entitles Barbara to scoff at any relationship until she meets Sheba Hart. Sheba brings out a strange possessiveness in Barbara. As a pottery teacher Sheba is new to St. Georges and it's politics. Barbara takes Sheba under her wing and desires to be her only friend. Except Sheba is capable of making a variety of relationships which fuel Barbara's jealousies. Barbara reminded me of the manipulative Iago in the way that she slyly pushed Sue, another St. Georges colleague, out of the friendship with Sheba. Three is definitely a crowd.
As mentioned before, Sheba is capable of making connections quickly. When she starts a physical relationship with a sixteen year old student in her pottery class, Barbara seizes the opportunity to be Sheba's only nonjudgmental confident, further pulling Sheba into a sick dependency. However, Barbara's immature need to be on the high horse of morality gets the better of her and she risks Sheba's friendship by keeping a journal. The more obsessed Sheba gets with the schoolboy, the more reckless she becomes. How long before the house of cards come crashing down? ( )

(3.5 stars, rounded down to 3)
'Notes on a Scandal' was a brutal work, with the term 'subverted expectations' looking as if it was coined for this book. The only thing letting down this novel is the prose, which is too light and straightforward for the dark subject matter. Granted, the book is meant to be a journal of sorts, but you are left terribly wanting after the novel has ended.
You first think that the book is about Bathsheba (Sheba) - a middle-aged pottery teacher having an affair with a fifteen-year old, and its repercussions.
But what really makes up the meat of the material is the point of view of Barbara, a senior teacher at the school at which Sheba teaches, and whose brutal, pitiful loneliness makes her a vivid character study - she ends up revealing more of her emotions and (sub?)conscious manipulations than she suspects.
This was a book that is a perfect example of 'what-could-have-been' - it is, nonetheless, an excellent read, full of complex characters and relationships. ( )

I really enjoyed this wonderfully observed novel, with its unreliable narrator and feckless, selfish, but ultimately pitiable heroine. It was full of great observervations and stark, very compact writing. I ( )

In the first part of the book, the protagonist is taking care of Sheba, and saying that Sheba hates to drink wine out of a carton, that Sheba is a bit of a snob but they're on a tight budget these days.
Barbara is a kind of a b****, and you get the sense of it when you see the way she treats Sheba one first she but gets hired as the pottery teacher at the school she works at.
"After the half-term holiday I desisted from all the little genealities with which I had been attempting to semaphore my Goodwill towards Sheba. I deliberately allowed my warm feelings to curdle into contempt. Occasionally, I confess, I went too far and stooped to some slightly childish insults. I would cough with suppressed laughter when Sheba was speaking to someone. Or I would do a dramatic double take when she walked into the staff room, to indicate my disapproval of her attire. Once, when the Hem of her skirt was hanging down at the back, I made a great show of presenting her with a safety pin in front of several colleagues."
If you've never worked in a public school, which is where these two women work, I can tell you that it's a dismal, backstabbing, favoritism type of place to work, full of people just like this bitch Barbara. Miserable sonsabitches that are just waiting out their retirement, forgetting completely the reason that they are there: the students.

On the day that Barbara first begins to get friendly with Sheba, she had gone to the Italian place down the street from their school for her lunch and a cigarette. I guess this was before they outlawed cigarettes in restaurants? Anyway, Sheba and another teacher, Sue, are having lunch together when Barbara walks by, and they invite her to sit with them. They start talking about men:
"I waited for her to stop, so that Sheba could finish what she'd been about to say. But she kept talking. 'Women are too canny to be taken in by flattery. If Ted says something nice to me, I know he's after a bit of nookie. That's the other thing. Men are such dogs, aren't they? Brains between their legs!'
I have never enjoyed this kind of women's talk - the hopelessness of the other sex and all that. sooner or later, it always seems to degenerate into tittering critiques of the male member. So silly. So beneath women. And funilly enough, the females who go in for this low grade misandry are usually the ones who are most enthralled to men. I glanced at Sheba. She was listening to Sue's chatter with apparent interest. was this the sort of conversation that had seduced her into becoming Sue's companion?"

But cutting Sue out of their little circle of companionship is easy, and Barbara becomes friends fairly easy with Sheba. When Sheba starts to tell her about her jail bait lover, Barbara has a hard time believing that could stoop so low:
" '... But the truth is, Barbara, doing that kind of thing us easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you're going to have a hangover tomorrow? Or, or, you take a bite of a donut, even though you know it's going straight to your thighs? Well, it's like that. You keep saying no, no, no until the moment when you say, oh bugger it. Yes.'
Connolly kept whispering something in her ear enough that first time behind the kiln. It was something urgent but muffled, and Sheba had to ask him to repeat himself several times. It was only when he reared back from her inpatiently and almost shouted that his words finally made sense. 'Miss,' he was saying, 'is it all right if I come in you, miss?' "

I think a reason I'm so disgusted with the character Sheba's affair with the schoolboy connolly, is that when I taught a composting class in a high school, one of the boys would tease me and ask me to go out to a movie with him. He infuriated me.
When sheba confesses to Barbara that she has been having sex with Connolly in her locked pottery lab at night in the school, Barbara is astounded that she could take such a risky chance.
"It is hard, I tell her, to interpret such drastically incautious behavior as anything rather than sexual obsession. But Sheba objects to that phrase. She says that it places undue emphasis on the carnal aspect of the relationship. The remorseless vulgarity of the press coverage has made her defensively high-minded. She wants it to be known that she and Connolly were not merely engaged in 'illicit ramps' and 'sex sessions.' They were in love. Just after the scandal broke, a Sunday Express reporter ambushed Connelly outside his house and asked him what had drawn him to his teacher. Connelly, in what is his sole public statement about the affair to date, replied, 'I fancied her, didn't i?' before being whisked By his mother into his father's waiting cab. The line is now famous. I understand it has become a kind of humorous catchphrase in the media. FOr Sheba, though, it is a terrible humiliation. when she first heard what Connolly had said it seemed to her that he was willfully belittling their romance -- disowning his true feelings in order to gratify the coarse expectations of the tabloids. She has since forgiven him."

Sheba and her husband have two children. One is a boy with Down's Syndrome, and the other is a teenage girl, who gives Sheba a terrible time.
"It has been difficult for Sheba, I think, watching Polly blossom. The way she looks at her daughter sometimes, it's not entirely friendly. She struggles against the envy. She knows she's had her time. But it's never easy to hand over the crown, is it? I've seen her close to tears on a number of occasions, describing the withering of her buttocks or a new knob of varicose she's found on the back of her knee. She feels, she says, as if her insides are slowly pushing outward - demanding to be noticed, finally, after all their years of patient service. Welcome to the club, I say. She doesn't want to be in the club. She wears a bra to bed every night because, When she was a girl, one of her friends' mothers told her that this was the way to stop your breasts from falling. Every night! I've told her it's useless. I've told her she could spend her entire life horizontal, with her breasts in steel reinforced slings, and they're still going to end up looking like empty purses. But she won't take the bra off."
Yeah, pretty sure a bra manufacturer made up that line.


Well I was first reading it, I thought two and a half Stars. But as I kept progressing further into the book, probably three quarters of the way in, I changed my mind, and knew it would be a four star book. Deliciously scandalous, and voyeuristic. ( )