A Separate Peace

"It takes place in a boys’ boarding school in America just before World War II. It has a little bit of that Brideshead feeling about it – a boy of privilege and a boy who just happens to be there – and it’s about this extraordinary friendship between a risk-taker – a confident, beautiful boy called Phineas – and his poorer, much more awkward, intellectual roommate, Gene. They create an initiation rite that involves jumping out of a very high tree, and it’s all about physical excellence. But Gene begins to be jealous of Phineas; a jealousy that grows angrier and angrier, as he thinks Phineas is trying to undermine his academic career, which is, of course, all he has. During one of the initiation rites, Gene joggles the branch of the tree. Phineas falls and shatters his leg and never realises that his best friend has done it. In the end Gene goes to see Phineas and tries to tell him that he did it, but Phineas won’t believe him or accept that he would ever have tried to hurt him. What I really love about it is that it’s one of the very few novels that I read as a kid that deal with that really intense kind of friendship between boys, a kind of presexual love story that grows up at boarding schools when there are no women around. I became very affected by it because of the subtlety of the psychological portrait of the two. It’s not very well-known in England, but it became a sort of required text in a lot of American schools – if you talk to most Americans my age, they will all cite it. It was just an amazing turning point kind of book. It was not only a bestseller, but one for all ages. Basically, the story is that kind of self-realisation that happens when someone begins to understand himself through someone else. It got something that no one had really talked about very much – that period in self-realisation where some people just seem to have the confidence and the rest of the world doesn’t, and there’s a huge attraction between those two poles but also a huge resentment"