According to his website, Robert Cormier was born and has always lived in Leominster, Massachusetts. He grew up there, went to school there, courted and married there, and raised four children in the house where he and his wife, Connie, still live. "I never intend to live anywhere else," he says. Cormier was a newspaper reporter and columnist for 30 years. He began writing, "in the seventh grade.”
Cormier sets The Chocolate War in Trinity, a private
academy for boys. Jerry Renault wants to
play football, and he has a poster in his locker, which reads, “Do I dare
disturb the universe?” Archie holds an
important office in a secret society known as the Vigil. Everyone knows about the Vigil and their
mostly harmless pranks, but no one talks about it – including the Brothers who
run the school. An overly ambitious
brother, Sebastian, seizes control of the school, when the headmaster is
sick. He launches a grand plan to raise
money by selling chocolate bars.
In one passage, Cormier describes one of the classrooms. “Brother Leon was getting ready to put on his
show. Jerry knew the symptoms – all the
guys knew them. Most of them were
freshmen and had been in Leon’s class only a month or so but the teacher’s
pattern had already emerged. First, Leon
gave them a reading assignment. Then
he’d pace up and down, up and down, restless sighing, wandering through the
aisles, the blackboard pointer poised in his hand, the pointer he used either
like a conductor’s baton or a musketeer’s sword. He’d use the tip to push around a book on a
desk or to flick a kid’s necktie, scratching gently down some guy’s back,
poking the pointer as if he were a rubbish collector picking his way through
the debris of the classroom. One day,
the pointer had rested on Jerry’s head for a moment, and then passed on. Unaccountably, Jerry had shivered, as if he
had just escaped some terrible fate” (38-39). Do we
professors really fall into those predictable routines?
That scene is all
too familiar to me. I can still see the
rubber-tipped pointer as it smudged the chalk, or came crashing down on the
hand of an unwary student whose mind wandered.
The pranks were
elaborate, sometimes funny, and usually required late night raids on the
school. In one, a timid student, fearful
of The Vigil, was ordered to loosen the screws in every desk and chair in one
classroom. The student worked
diligently, but after four hours, he had barely finished a quarter of the
seats. Archie and his gang arrive to help
finish the job.
I thoroughly enjoyed
The Chocolate War, but I see from the list of “Also by Robert
Cormier” that he has a sequel, Beyond the
Chocolate War. I think I need to
hunt that one down. 5 stars
--Chiron, 6/7/14
No comments:
Post a Comment