We’ve reached the end of 20 Books of Summer 2023, and with this, I have read and reviewed eight books, which I count as a huge win! Three of those were 1001 Books, two were by women in translation, and at least one had been on my shelf for more than ten years. Huge thanks to Cathy and all the participants for the motivation.

I just about died recently, when I heard someone on Booktube refer to The Idiot (Batumen, not Dostoyevsky) as “dark academia”. In what world? I’m not saying an adult, literary novel can’t be classified this way but like… The Idiot just isn’t it. It’s missing the gothic setting and magic and whatnot. It’s a campus novel at best, and I’d argue it’s not even that because a fair amount of the book takes place off-campus.

It got me thinking about adult novels that do have the requisite lush settings, closed societies, mystery, and danger, like The Secret History and Vita Nostra, and whether a book like Abigail fits.

Most of the action in Abigail takes place in a fortress-like boarding school, and it’s got some sorta-supernatural elements, namely, a statue named “Abigail” the school girls confide in via written notes, and who sometimes writes back. It’s a closed society but it’s very much in the real world of Hungary in 1943, and it’s a very refreshing take on the coming of age novel, in that romance and friendship are present, but are not the drivers of Gina’s journey. 

Gina enters Bishop Matula school as a child, with no idea why her beloved father, “the General,” banished her from her comfortable, cosmopolitan life in Budapest, to a religious school in the middle of nowhere full of naive country girls. By the midway point, she is forced to grow up when her father tells her the truth about why he’s hidden her away, and about what’s really happening to Hungary, and to him.  

The mystery and magic of “Abigail”, as in, how a statue is able to respond to the various crises and complaints of the girls, drives the early narrative, but for me, this was a story about bullying, and adults trying to exert control over the uncontrollable force that is teenage girls. The real dark side of academia!

I grew up in a time where bullying was seen as pretty normal and nothing to get worked up about, while my kids are growing up with pink shirt days and no-bullying pledges. Despite having been bullied myself, in a somewhat similar way as Gina (this book is most realistic depiction of bullying I’ve ever read), I’m skeptical of anti-bullying campaigns. Isn’t the whole point of bullying that kids get to subvert the social order adults want to impose, the “play nice” messages they’ve been fed since preschool? A way for those with little control over most aspects of life to exert control over the most relevant things in their view: their peers? Why would a social marketing campaign cooked up by adults change all that? Maybe I’m too cynical, but I just don’t see bullying going away.

There’s more to this story than bullying, though. What makes it so genius is that it parallels the social control inside Bishop Mantula (both official – the strict rules and routines – and unofficial – the unspoken social rules the girls concoct, and severe consequences for those who don’t conform to both) with the social control exerted by a nation during wartime. Communication is strictly controlled and mostly propaganda in both cases, so the sudden appearance of anti-war messages on landmarks, in train stations, and even in the church feel just as magical as the messages from Abigail. The girls nominating one student to sing hymns loudly in the dayroom, so the rest can gossip undetected, is just as ingenious as the dissident who breaks into the church, and switches all the readings and hymns to ones with anti-war messages. Teenage girls are dissidents in training – by the end, quite literally.

I still don’t know if this all counts as “dark academia” or if that even matters, but fans of The Secret History or Vita Nostra will probably like this, as it takes its young student characters seriously while still portraying them as suitably naive, and all the more dangerous for it.