Atlanta author Christopher Swann doesn't waste time in explaining the title of his tense debut novel.
"Shadow of the Lions" begins with 18-year-old Matthias Glass staring down a pair of ferocious felines at the entrance of the Blackburne School in rural Virginia. The stone lions are as rigid and unforgiving as the institution itself, where breaking the honor code means immediate expulsion. But a missing eye on one of the statues suggests that menace might lurk in unseen places.
Swann, who teaches English at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School, sets in motion a mystery that’s emotionally engaging and loyal (at first) to the traditions of boarding school novels. The textbook example may be Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” though John Knowles’s “A Separate Peace” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” also come to mind. “Lions” dutifully supplies the subgenre’s required tropes — unconventional instructors, intense friendships and fatal betrayals — but goes rogue during an unpredictable finale.
Matthias arrives at Blackburne as “an awkward metal-mouthed beanpole” who struggles to find acceptance among his blueblood classmates. Despite the snobbery and savagery typical of any all-boys school, Matthias forms a close friendship with Fritz Davenport, an athlete from a posh D.C. family.
Their bond gets tested near the end of senior year when Matthias is accused of cheating on an exam. The school’s honor code, as “stark as barbed wire against snow,” requires swift punishment. Fritz vouches for his bestie, who later confesses that the cheating was just an innocent “accident.” After an argument, Fritz flees into the forest on the edge of campus. It soon becomes clear that Fritz isn’t sulking: He’s missing.
A decade later, Matthias still wonders how the boy ran into the woods and “off the edge of the earth.” No ransom note or suicide letter ever turns up. Fritz’s family declares him legally dead. Matthias isn’t convinced.
The loss overshadows his promising writing career in New York. Once hailed as a rising star whose first book was a bestseller, Matthias finds himself blocked and broke. He accepts a teaching job at Blackburne out of sheer desperation. Middleton, the school’s disciplinarian, welcomes him back with an unsolicited lecture on being an educator. “We give boys direction, purpose,” he says. “We send them into the world as better, stronger men. We kill their inertness.” It’s an ironic statement in light of Matthias’s trajectory.
Swann says he drew from his experiences attending a boarding school near Charlottesville, Virginia, but that the novel isn’t an autobiography. Instead, it seems to be an homage to a different kind of lions, the literary type. Matthias mentions that his favorite book is “A Catcher in the Rye.” He shares a surname with J.D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family. It seems odd that characters keep quoting “Hamlet,” until a curious parallel surfaces later in the novel.
The struggle between Matthias and Fritz reads like a sort of Cain and Abel story. By admitting that he cheated, Matthias fears that he’s killed his closest friend. “We weren’t brothers,” he says, “we were beyond that.”
But the bucolic Virginia countryside turns out to be a far cry from Paradise. Flashback chapters recall a not-so-distant era when teenagers hadn’t yet merged with smartphones and no one had heard of Adderall. While bullying appears to be a perennial pastime, the level of viciousness escalates over the years. When Matthias discovers a stash of marijuana hidden in a dorm room, it’s the first hint of a vast and clandestine conspiracy with deep, dark roots.
The initial third of the novel drips with melancholy and nostalgia, but not much action. Swann sheds light on the peculiar mix of emotions Matthias experiences as he settles into his new job. “Teachers had always seemed to float above such considerations,” he says. “Now I found myself feeling like a new boy struggling for acceptance.”
The struggles compound after Matthias discovers the body of one of his students in the woods, an apparent suicide. It makes him realize how much he despises the forest that surrounds Blackburne, comparing it to the enchanted wild from a fairy tale. “Those woods were haunted, even if only by memories.”
Later, a return to the scene of the crime proves to be the novel’s most chilling scene. Eerie noises lead Matthias to a rustic cabin, where he’s attacked by a skull-capped trespasser. The eruption of violence and heart-pounding pursuit of the assailant feels borrowed from a different novel. Ditto for the layers of intrigue that pile up as Matthias and former classmates investigate shady doings on and off campus. Even the author seems to joke about the book’s genre shift. In researching Fritz’s disappearance, Matthias quips, “This seemed too ‘Da Vinci Code,’ and I wasn’t a Harvard symbiologist.” Later, though, he ponders if he can keep acting like a responsible teacher when he’s much more interested in playing detective.
The answer comes quickly once the plot crisscrosses into Elmore Leonard mode. The final act turns on convoluted developments concerning everything from medical marijuana to corporate espionage. Any worthwhile mystery relies on well-managed misdirection, but too many red herrings eventually start to smell.
Despite the hiccups, “Shadow of the Lions” qualifies as a promising, well-crafted debut. Swann has a remarkable gift for describing fleeting experiences. As the minutes tick toward a dreaded hazing ceremony, Blackburne freshmen “cower in the lecture hall, waiting for the stroke of doom.” Later, when tensions erupt with Fritz, Matthias feels “locked into a terrible moment at the edge of our friendship.” Such flashes of lyrical agility suggest a bright new talent ready to
roar.
FICTION
‘Shadow of the Lions’
By Christopher Swann
Algonquin
367 pages, $27
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