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Fall

3.13 of 5 stars 3.13 · rating details · 338 ratings · 70 reviews

A place of pressure and contradictions, St Ebury is an exclusive boarding school for the children of Canada's elite, where boys must act as men while navigating their adolescence; a mixed school with only a handful of girls.

Fall is the most beautiful. At night the bathrooms and beds hum with thoughts of her. Noel, a clever, ghostly loner, prowls the corridors on weekends,...more

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published March 3rd 2009

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Apr 23, 2009 Caitlin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

I got an advanced review copy of this from goodreads.com. It's ostensibly a boarding school story. Rich, popular & privileged Julius is dating Fall (short for Fallon) the prettiest girl in the boarding school. Noel, a misfit with violent tendencies, becomes his roommate & is thrilled to be accepted into the inner circle & more & more obsessed with Fall. When Fall disappears, the true nature of these relationships and people are revealed.

On a deeper level this book is an explorati...more I got an advanced review copy of this from goodreads.com. It's ostensibly a boarding school story. Rich, popular & privileged Julius is dating Fall (short for Fallon) the prettiest girl in the boarding school. Noel, a misfit with violent tendencies, becomes his roommate & is thrilled to be accepted into the inner circle & more & more obsessed with Fall. When Fall disappears, the true nature of these relationships and people are revealed.

On a deeper level this book is an exploration of narrative voice & of how narrative voice shapes story & what we ultimately can & cannot know about it & about others.

Julius' voice is handled conversationally. He appears to us through snippets of dialogue between himself & others & between himself & himself. There's nothing earth-shattering about Julius. He's your basic 17-year-old boy - in love for the first time, experiencing sex for the first time, trying to find out what life is all about. He's not Holden Caulfield - preternaturally intellectual & self-aware - he's something much simpler & much more real.

Noel writes from the perspective of a 30-year-old looking back on events. His parts of the story are much more a complete & polished narrative. Noel is also a sociopath, as we discover throughout the course of the novel, & his reflections communicate that sense of close observation, of taking mental notes on how others act & react so as to perform the role of human being with realism.

In the end, Fall is a cipher. She is given no voice of her own & exists only in the ways she is observed & discussed by Julius & Noel. She mirrors our experience of the beautiful young girl who disappears & is probably murdered - reported on endlessly, discussed around water coolers, & always little more than a set of pictures on the news.

I liked this book. Colin McAdams can write. There are ways in which this is perhaps more of a writing exercise than a novel with a compelling story, but for me the writing was pleasurable in & of itself & now I'm curious to go back & read his first book.(less)

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Feb 02, 2009 Mel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I got an ARC of Fall at the ALA midwinter meeting. I originally picked it up because the back likens McAdam to Michael Ondaatje, who is, you know, my absolute favorite. But, like several remarks on the back cover, I disagree. Their writing styles are very disparate, and while McAdam's writing is good, it's not poetic the way most of Ondaatje's work is.

Furthermore, the back suggests that Julius, one of the character's whose pov we hear quite frequently, "cares only for fleeting joys", but I don'...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Carole rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2013

Although this novel is flawed, it is very intriguing. I would rather read a book by an author who is willing to take some risks, even if they are not all successful, than one that is conventional but plodding.

The story focuses on Noel and Julius, two students at a prep school outside of Ottawa and the dynamic between them is definitely reminiscent of the YA classic, "A Separate Peace", although with considerably more adult content. Fall (Fallon) is the girl that they are both in love with and i...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Leslee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-nobel-pulitzer-winners, literary-fiction, set-in-higher-learning

It's always nice to read a Canadian author, and this one has a more storied pedigree having been shortlisted for the Giller prize in 2009. This is the tale of 2 very different boys that through exegent circumstances become roommates at a highly prestigious boarding school in Ontario. One boy is handsome, popular and dating the most beautiful girl in school, while the other is a quiet loner who barely has any friends, and is secretly in love with his roommate's girlfriend. As the year progresses...more

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May 13, 2013 Kathy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I chose this book after listening to Colin being interviewed on the radio by Sheilagh Rodgers. I was quite disappointed.It takes place in an elite private school (co-ed)in Ottawa. The main characters are 18 year old room-mates.They are two very different young lads: Noel is Canadian who father is a diplomat living in Australia. He is a loner, really doesn't have any friends and is very well read and intelligent. Julius is the son of a US ambassador who lives not far from the school, but still st...more

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Sep 25, 2009 Laura Lulu rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, mystery-suspense-thriller

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Aug 10, 2009 Theresa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

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Aug 30, 2010 Natalie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I first picked up this book I thought I was going to hate it! It's written in a very sparse style, no speech marks and no clear sign of who is saying what, it's all he/she said, which initially was rather irritating and confusing! Once I had learned to follow closely who was narrating/speaking, it got better though and I stuck with it.
The style and atmosphere of the book reminded me somewhat of The Cather in the Rye by JD Salinger, (although with a little more substance than that one I fel...more

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May 13, 2009 Newengland rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, finished-in-2009

Maybe I liked it because I like the genre -- prep school books (no, I never went). There are a lot of well-written stretches and McAdam truly understands boys and dorm life, from the grab-ass pranks to the subterranean desires and confusions.

I thought it was going to be straight-up sensitive drama à la Richard Yates A Good School, but it developed (devolved?) instead into a crime drama. The protagonist, Julian, is a charismatic athlete with a gorgeous girlfriend named Fall. Enter the dragon in...more

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Apr 26, 2009 Gilly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book is told in the alternating voices of two boys in their senior year at an elite private high school. Julius is athletic, likeable, and dating the prettiest girl in school. Noel is an intelligent and occasionally explosive outsider. You can imagine this devolving into stereotyped characterizations, but their voices are absolutely individual. They say and do things that, while never in conflict with their personalities, are not narrowly designed to reveal “character.” They change (and fail...more The book is told in the alternating voices of two boys in their senior year at an elite private high school. Julius is athletic, likeable, and dating the prettiest girl in school. Noel is an intelligent and occasionally explosive outsider. You can imagine this devolving into stereotyped characterizations, but their voices are absolutely individual. They say and do things that, while never in conflict with their personalities, are not narrowly designed to reveal “character.” They change (and fail to change) over time in ways that are subtle and believable. The same is true for the secondary characters.
The two boys are very different, but one pleasure in this book is that they’re also similar, because they are, first of all, human and young. In their very different interactions with the beautiful Fall, Julius and Noel demonstrate the ways that desire (not just romantic or sexual but definitely that, too) distorts how we see each other, can even blind us to each other’s humanity. Both boys feel trapped and infantilized by the many rules of boarding school; McAdam made me feel again what it was like to be 17 and going crazy inside my own body because I was not quite free yet. The book also captures beautifully the experience of living inside a mind inside a body. Both the cerebral Noel and the more blithe Julius describe how physical sensation is a kind of knowing, yet both seek truer connection, deeper understanding. Julius’s voice is a stream of consciousness broken up into mostly single-sentence or even single-word paragraphs; dialogue and action are written in the same way, as they are being perceived rather than described. It’s a little annoying at times, but I found it both appropriate to the particular character and effective at conveying the feel of living.
Noel, reflecting on the events of the story years later, sounds so intelligent and thoughtful that it’s tempting to accept his observations at face value. Yet he’s entirely unreliable, and the lessons he learned are absolutely the wrong ones. He still doesn’t get that he imposed his own perceptions on Julius and Fall, and he still has not taken full responsibility for his own choices. But McAdam doesn’t say any of this explicitly; he trusts his readers. He also doesn’t offer easy explanations for why the characters do what they do. He brings in back stories, families, and class, but dismisses all these as insufficient. This is a morally challenging book, and artfully written.(less)

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Jul 24, 2011 Shirley added it

Fall by Colin McAdam has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize this year (2009) and is the fourth of five nominees I have read. While I would not choose it as my favourite of the four (my choice would be The Disappeared by Kim Echlin), it certainly deserves to be shortlisted. The setting is Ashbury College, a primarily boys' private school in Rockcliffe Park in Ottawa (disguised by the author as St. Ebury in Sutton). The setting has particular interest for me since our house is a stone's throw a...more

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May 02, 2009 Coco rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: coming-of-age, crime-mystery, fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. It sounds cliche, but author Colin McAdam had me at the first line, "Half an hour of lips and silk in the front and back and her cheeks are like peaches like peaches like peaches." I felt I didn't so much read this book as experience it, revel in it, run it through my fingers and inhale it.

One caveat--don't be swayed the synopsis on the back of the book. In that write-up, the character of Julius is described as caring only for fleeting joys--sneeking out, playing pranks with friends, and spendin...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Taiyiana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: never-finished

You when I saw this book, I thought what a nice cover maybe I should give it a go. I thought that it was gonna be interesting because I like reading stories set in boarding schools (e.i. Prep, Harry Potter etc.) I got into this book, like really into where I was like making audible noises when reading it in public places and then I got to the climax and I'm embarassed to admit that I never finished this book completely. (view spoiler)...more

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Jun 08, 2013 Caley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm usually lured into stories of elite boarding school kids and their dilemmas, which usually involve something lurid, like murder, drugs, depression, or some combination of all three. McAdams doesn't disappoint in delivering the standard plot formula as it relates to privileged, white folk in enclosed academic spaces and he really succeeds here in establishing a good feel of normalcy and pattern to their wealth, which sometimes authors depict poorly. But that's really where it ends for positiv...more

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Oct 12, 2012 Mauberley added it · review of another edition

There is a good story in Fall as well as what seems to me to be a very good evocation of the world of a co-ed private school. The author adopts an interesting technique to tell the story, one that uses shifting narrative voices and viewpoints. Importantly, I think, we know the title character (of this cleverly titled book) only through the descriptions of other characters. Not all of the characters in this novel are terribly well drawn - Ant and Chuck are particularly repulsive. Julius' father a...more

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Jul 19, 2010 Mike Iovinelli rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Eh. That's all I can say..."eh." The back of the book makes the story seem so promising. But I was left wanting a little more. I found the style of writing a little annoying, especially Julius's character and his A.D.D. stream of conscious. Sometimes you're just reading to read and not really paying attention because his thoughts don't link together. I know that was the point, but I found it frustrating.
I also thought that the majority of the book was spent setting up who everyone was...a lot o...more

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May 22, 2009 Jocelyn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: young folks

Shelves: read-in-2009, fiction, giveaway-wins

I won this book in one of Goodreads' giveaways, and I was pretty ecstatic to get started reading it. I was sidetracked by other books while trying to finish this one but, luckily, it was a very easy book to pick back up.

Fall revolves around three strange, sad characters at a private school. Thrown in with regular teenage problems is money and obsession, yet somehow it's still the antithesis of Gossip Girl. McAdam avoids the cliches which most authors can't seem to get away from, and I would con...more

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Oct 28, 2011 Leyla Y rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-humanities-books

Strange as it seems, this book is not about the season of Autumn. The book is titled after one of the characters names. Fall, short for Fallon. Fall is the name of the girl that is mostly talked about in this book. Two roommates at a prep school share their stories about how their senior years are going. Julius is an athletic guy that happens to be dating the prettiest girl in school. As for Noel, he is the stereotypical intelligent one. Stereotypical as in, he’s an outsider. Both characters ar...more

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May 06, 2011 Joanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-books-read

Noel & Julius (the campus star) share a room at St. Ebury, an exclusive boarding school in Canada. Noel has a malformed eye that twitches and comes across as the serious loner. Julius is the athlete and has a beautiful girlfriend, Fall (Fallon).
Julius starts becoming more obsessed with Julius, Fall and their whole relationship. Julius and Noel become friends, with Julius sharing things about his relationship with Fall as they are lying in their bunks at night.
We are given the story through t...more

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May 19, 2009 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

Fall is about two boarding-school roommates, one creepy and one popular and with a girlfriend. Can you imagine where this is headed? Yes, it turns out the creepy one, Noel, has a thing for Julius's girlfriend, who mysteriously "disappears" 2/3rds of the way through the book.

Anyway, it's not the plot that makes this book, it's the prose. McAdam pulls the Faulkner-like "from more than one first-person narrative" thing, but it's not as much of a guessing game as As I Lay Dying. Sometimes things th...more Fall is about two boarding-school roommates, one creepy and one popular and with a girlfriend. Can you imagine where this is headed? Yes, it turns out the creepy one, Noel, has a thing for Julius's girlfriend, who mysteriously "disappears" 2/3rds of the way through the book.

Anyway, it's not the plot that makes this book, it's the prose. McAdam pulls the Faulkner-like "from more than one first-person narrative" thing, but it's not as much of a guessing game as As I Lay Dying. Sometimes things that could have been delicious puzzles are later made too explicit for my tastes ("First letter I got from Julius was two years after I was fired" from the chauffeur, but instead of leaving us puzzling this together it's made completely clear that he's fired as a kind of scapegoat).

I have some problems with the prose of Noel's narrations. He's supposed to be looking back on the events from twenty years, but sometimes he writes as if he is completely unaware of how things end up ("I felt like it was then that our bond really developed" - not only do I always want to gag when someone mentions "bonding," but I think the 30-year-old Noel is smart enough to realize that their bond was illusory). Noel also says other groan-worthy tritisms: "I never trusted myself" and "the things I did could not have been stopped." Maybe McAdam wants us to feel some disgust for Noel's determinism, and if so he succeeded.

Despite my distaste for Noel's dramatics, I found some nice insights from his point of view - how he only could read when others were around, since it separated him from them, how he wonders if he defined himself through avoiding others, or if it was even his choice to begin with. In the end though, I kind of resent identifying with the creepy guy. Maybe it's because I can be a little creepy myself, and I don't like to admit that. I'm also not sure if these insights are consistent with how uninsightful Noel seems in the end.

Julius's narratives (the popular one) are semi-stream-of-consciousness. I say "semi-" because it doesn't feel like the overwhelming streams from Woolf or Joyce; it's easy to follow and in the beginning has a bit of a lyrical quality. I wasn't especially curious about exactly how teenage boys think about their girlfriends, but oh well.

All and all, I enjoyed having a sneak-peak on a book I probably wouldn't have read. I like knowing what's going on in modern literature, and I like reading from Canadian authors every now and then (even if just to remind myself they exist). I don't think that Fall will become a classic in 100 years, but to me it's important to see that authors are still experimenting with how to tell stories.

One final note on content: there's quite a bit of swearing, shower-room type scenes, and a bit of sex, which would have scandalized my high school self. I'd recommend the book for people who wouldn't be offended by those things. (less)

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May 22, 2009 Kathy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was lucky enough to win an advance copy of this book from goodreads and have finished it! This book had many pros/cons to me. I enjoyed McAdam's writing style (it almost reads like poetry at times) and character development. After initially feeling confused by the book and characters, I became immersed in the story and couldn't put it down. That said, the book focuses mainly on high school boarding students - particularly on two teenaged boys - and the story can become crude and even a little...more

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Apr 26, 2009 Corinna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009

I just finished reading Fall. I enjoyed it, hated it but couldn't seem to put it down. I felt as if I was really in the minds of these boys. Because of the way the book was wrote, I was privy to not only what the characters said to one another, but also what they were thinking. The book was about prominent children, many of them kids of ambassadors, and their life at boarding school. Centered around two room mates, one the good looking jock, the other mysterious and looking for recognition. Oh a...more

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Apr 21, 2009 Tara Lynn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads, booklist-for-2009

Jackie won this book through a GoodReads giveaway, and I'm going to start it as soon as I finish up with the Hearts of Horses.

***Edit- Finished. Definitely an interesting read. I'm impressed overall. Despite a rocky start in the beginning that left the narrative a little confusing, I managed to get into it by the third chapter or so. I did see a few editing problems, but as this is a promo unedited copy, I expect that'll be cleaned up in the finished product.

The story's great, kinda like a Sepe...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Steven Langdon rated it 3 of 5 stars

"Fall," another of the novels nominated for this 2009 Giller Prize, is a penetrating story, tracing the deeply disturbing triangle that somehow entangles three senior students in an elite private school (that is based very much on Ashbury College which the author attended.) Julius is the privileged son of the US Ambassador to Canada, Wink is the guarded, sometimes bullied room-mate who gradually insinuates himself more and more fully into a close relationship with Julius, and Fall (Fallon) is th...more "Fall," another of the novels nominated for this 2009 Giller Prize, is a penetrating story, tracing the deeply disturbing triangle that somehow entangles three senior students in an elite private school (that is based very much on Ashbury College which the author attended.) Julius is the privileged son of the US Ambassador to Canada, Wink is the guarded, sometimes bullied room-mate who gradually insinuates himself more and more fully into a close relationship with Julius, and Fall (Fallon) is the bewitching girl boarder whose boyfriend is Julius -- but whom both boys in their own ways love.

The strength of this novel lies in the elliptical ways that these changing relationships are traced, from the perspective of Julius, interwoven with the later thoughts of Wink on what took place, and broadened by the retrospective of William -- the chauffeur who helped Julius advance his love affair with Fall. The changing of pace and style, the back and forth shifting of time -- these contribute to the developing tension that drive this book, and turn its complexity in a darker direction.

In the end, though, I have some serious problems with this novel and the fundamentals of its plot and characterization. Fall and her fellow women students, for me, with my knowledge of the private school context here in Ottawa in which my two daughters have been involved, simply do not come across as credible. Their willingness to leap into bed with boys, their desire to get drunk and do drugs, and their passivity in the face of what has to be seen as suspicious and possibly threatening behavior -- this does not square with the assertiveness and self-possessed confidence that seem far more the norm for the teenage women at schools like Ashbury. Nor do I find it believable that the security around the US Ambassador's residence would be so casual that a young man could simply take off in the limousine with the goal of seducing his girlfriend.

There are nevertheless compelling dynamics of friendship and rivalry being played out in this book. That makes the novel a powerful experience to read. But as the story reached its climax, I found my doubts preventing me from going where McAdam wished to take me. I found myself thinking of what would be happening in a scenario where Fall was more than a teenage boy's sex symbol -- where she was the sort of fully-formed and competent character that in reality she would surely have been.(less)

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Jul 03, 2012 Monique rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: just-good-general-easy-reading-fict

Hmm, really wanted to love this book but alas it was a little too patchy and inconclusive to me..Fall (not Fall with the long A like synonym of autumn but Fall with a short A as in Fallon, a girls name) is the story of two roommates and their time in a prep school for boys. If this was the entire story, their relationship, their "boys will be boys" antics and how they grow emotionally and psychologically I would love love love this book however when the element of a girlfriend who goes missing,...more

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Aug 03, 2010 Jeanne rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: back-to-school

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Jun 09, 2012 Surreysmum rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, canlit, general-fiction, passed-on

"Oh no," I groaned as I started this book. "More stream-of-consciousness. What am I doing to myself?" However, in this case it works. The author has three different voices, all male, all telling some parts of the story (and sometimes giving the same incident from different points of view, which is very illuminating). The most unsettling by far is the one that is lucid, articulate, and educated - Noel, a loner at the exclusive boarding school that forms the setting for most of the incidents in th...more "Oh no," I groaned as I started this book. "More stream-of-consciousness. What am I doing to myself?" However, in this case it works. The author has three different voices, all male, all telling some parts of the story (and sometimes giving the same incident from different points of view, which is very illuminating). The most unsettling by far is the one that is lucid, articulate, and educated - Noel, a loner at the exclusive boarding school that forms the setting for most of the incidents in the novel. As the novel progresses, Noel casually lets slip references to entirely unsettling happenings &/or thoughts in his past that lead us to conclude that he is, indeed, entirely capable of a psychopathic act - like the murder of the title female/object, Fall (short for Fallon). The most streamy stream-of-consciousness sections belong to Julian, who is about as dim and body/sex-obsessed as you'd expect an eighteen-year-old boy to be. He's Fall's boyfriend, and therefore another object of Noel's obsession; he's also Noel's roommate, and fills the most-popular-boy-in-the school role. The third voice, a relatively minor one, is that of William, a disillusioned chauffeur (Julian's father is an ambassador); William's own musings occasionally have disquieting echoes in the thoughts of the boys, but he's chiefly there to give historical perspective.

I liked the pictures of life in a quasi-traditional Canadian institution ("the place has traditions, but the traditions aren't old," says Noel. And I appreciated (though, not being an admirer of the 18-year-old male beast in general, I didn't particularly like) the very realistic sound of the boys' voices and thoughts.

I wish we could have had Fall's voice as well, but that's not what this novel is about; it's about belonging and not belonging in a closed male-dominated society (Julian also has father issues, lest we miss that particular point), and about how violence can erupt shockingly when the dangerous ones aren't properly diagnosed.

There aren't really any spoilers to protect in this plot; if there's one thing I have to complain about it's that McAdam draws us in and invests us in Fall's fate, but leaves us hanging, though with reasonably strong suspicions. It may be more true to the way life actually operates, but it's damn annoying in a novel!

Anyway, thank you, little brother, for this Christmas gift and out of the ordinary read for me.(less)

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Apr 30, 2012 Kate rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Someone somewhere wrote that this read more like a writing exercise than an actual novel. I would have to agree with that. It's stream of consciousness writing, which is pulled off quite well, that really is quite amazing and gripping until Fall finally goes missing. I did enjoy how we never know what happens to her or how we never know precisely if what Noel says is true.

Noel basically becomes a sociopath but you have inklings of this from the beginning. His relationship with Julius is inciden...more

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Sep 30, 2009 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First off, a disclaimer. I love the book cover, the author's name, the book title, and the awesome photograph. On the back jacket, a quote from the Aryn Kyle (author of The God of Animals) praises the book. So, um, I was a little biased before I even started reading.[return][return]The adult novel mainly alternates between the voices of two teenage upperclassmen at an elite boarding school. Both are sons of ambassadors/diplomats and used to a privileged life. Julius is handsome, friendly, athlet...more

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Mar 05, 2010 Jennifer D. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian, library-borrow

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. from quill and quire, as it about sums up my feelings exactly:

The "Fall" that provides the title to this well written novel is Fallon DeStindt, a student at an exclusive Ottawa-area boarding school who mysteriously disappears half way through the book. Two people who seem to be implicated are her boyfriend Julius, son of the American ambassador, and Julius's roommate Noel, son of Canada's Consul General to Australia (author Colin McAdam is himself the son of a diplomat and attended Ottawa's Ashb...more from quill and quire, as it about sums up my feelings exactly:

The "Fall" that provides the title to this well written novel is Fallon DeStindt, a student at an exclusive Ottawa-area boarding school who mysteriously disappears half way through the book. Two people who seem to be implicated are her boyfriend Julius, son of the American ambassador, and Julius's roommate Noel, son of Canada's Consul General to Australia (author Colin McAdam is himself the son of a diplomat and attended Ottawa's Ashbury College, so he knows the milieu).

The presentation shuttles skilfully among different points of view and makes heavy use of a stream-of-consciousness approach in the Julius sections. The immediacy of these parts suits Julius's personality, as he is an unreflective, somewhat naive bundle of hormones, living only in the moment and head-over-heels in love with Fall. Political allegory takes a turn for the psycho-sexual when our well-hung, innocent neighbour to the south meets Noel, a creepy closet case far less well-endowed who likes to lift weights and read Thomas Hobbes. Noel tells his side of the story looking back on the events from a mature perspective. Still in Ottawa, he has landed a job with the CRTC.

There's a B-movie flavour to all of this, but the writing is fresh and alert throughout, allowing McAdam to express the random poetry of perception ("words chasing thoughts") while recreating the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boarding school and its little world of boredom, privilege, and "enforced infantilization." The plot is also deftly handled, from its puzzle-without-a-solution missing center to the playful side-notes and paranoid leitmotifs. Bald men start to seem particularly sinister.

The only real negative is the amount of time spent on the heavy petting and puppy love that goes on between Julius and Fall. Young lovers are annoying enough when passed on the street; this amount of close exposure - not excluding the bumping teeth as they stare deep, deep into one another's eyes - is too much, especially given the stylistic extremes these sections go to (sex, for example, is rendered as "Phoo. Ooo. Aah. Mm. Sss. Pha. Sh. Ga. Ga. Gah." etc.). Add to this the truism that the villain in such pieces is always more interesting than the beautiful people and the love story seems that much weaker in comparison.(less)

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About Colin McAdam

Colin McAdam was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Denmark, England and Barbados, as well as in several cities in Canada. He studied English and Classics at McGill University and the University of Toronto, and received his PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University in England.

He has written for Harper's Magazine and The Walrus. He lives in Montreal and has a son named Charlie who lives in...more

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“In the closet, in my nest of human cloth, I dreamt of skinless people, a world of living meat, clinched in a wounded hug and finally understanding. We would truly feel the cold, we would truly know each other.” — 1 person liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6368868-fall?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328414963l/6368868.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6368868-fall?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Fall by Colin McAdam[/url]

Fall

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