Unputdownable

Black Chalk is Christopher Yates’s debut novel. Hopefully it will not be his last.

It tells the story of a year spent by six students at “Pitt College” at Oxford who seek a remedy for their student ennui by playing The Game, an abstract mixture of chance and strategy.

Players collect one or more consequences in each round, the severity depending on the player’s lack of skill during that sequence.

As the game progresses and players get to know each other’s foibles and embarrassment triggers, consequences are tailored to inflict increasing degrees of psychological stress.

Refusal to undertake a consequence forces players to drop out.

As the number of participants decreases, the penalties become harsher until a level of dystopia is arrived at comparable to that of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Lurking in the background are three members of the secretive “GameSoc”.

A government agency? A klatch of sadistic voyeurs? Who knows – but GameSoc has sponsored The Game and reserves the right, at some point, to inject a consequence of its own.

Somehow reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, eventually The Game is whittled down to two players. Insurmountable acrimony and at least one fatality lead, by a cut of the cards, to the outcome being postponed for 14 years.

The story is as intriguing as it is convoluted and as disturbing as it is intense, emotions exacerbated by whichever of the two loses have to face GameSoc’s consequence.

The book draws the reader in – somewhat slowly at first – to become, as they say, “unputdownable”.