Echoes of Tom Brown’s School Days: Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind, reviewed

The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a kilt) and routinely hang ‘smaller kids in duvets… out the window’. The horseshoe effect in schooling terms: the more expensive, the more savage.

Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits opens with a bang: ‘When the shotgun went off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like the top of a turnip lantern.’ It is reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. We do eventually learn what really happened to Douglas Burchill, dead at 19, but at the heart of the novel is a lonely adolescent trying to find his footing. Tommo is parentless: ‘My mum was in hospital… my dad was in Hollywood, and I lived with a cat.’