“That’s the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention.”
The narrator can offer little comfort, except for perhaps laying a hand on G’s, which he is not sure will be welcome. In Mentor, the first of nine interlinked stories, anxious student G reveals his heartbreak over a best friend who has rejected his romantic advances. Spin the bottle turns out to be an apt metaphor for the book’s symmetrical structure, with the narrator at the centre of a circle of troubled characters, each taking turns to tell their story. Desire remains closely linked with disease, pleasure always darkly ripening into danger – even in a relatively innocent game of spin the bottle among colleagues. Greenwell’s much-anticipated follow-up, Cleanness, follows the same unnamed expat teacher in Sofia – a man for whom sex is still “fraught with shame and anxiety and fear”.
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