When a debut novel by a 24-year-old is touted as “a glimpse into the future of the novel itself”, expectations are necessarily high. Yet for the first few chapters of the New Zealander Eleanor Catton’s story about a sex scandal at a girls’ school nothing seems particularly unusual. Yes, the writing is uncommonly witty and bold, and the characters leap from the page fully formed, but it is not until the metaphorical camera pulls away from the scene of gossiping teenagers to reveal that they are actors playing parts that you realise something is up.

From that moment, things spiral out from our ordinary definition of a fictional reality to reveal multiple kinds of truth. There is the real-life story of Victoria, who was found in a clinch with her music teacher, Mr Saladin. There are the many versions of that story played out by Victoria’s drama-hungry classmates, all of whom want to prove how the scandal affected them and so perform their emotions as best they can to anyone who will listen. Then, across town, we have the goings-on in the local drama school, a wonderfully rendered place of pretentious teachers and precious young adults, seen through the circumspect eyes of Stanley, a shy student whose performance history is limited to an annual dinner with his estranged father, a psychologist, who expects Stanley’s updates to give him good value for money.

Stanley’s drama teachers lecture him in the theory and praxis of performing other people’s lives, and he and his classmates are keen to push the boundaries of theatrical realism as far as possible to win their approval. To this end, they decide that their end-of-term play should be a re-enactment of the local scandal of the girl who slept with her teacher. Everyone has read about it in the newspaper, and its themes of sexuality, pedagogy and performance (Mr Saladin is the conductor of the school jazz band) naturally appeal to the young actors. However, unbeknown to the others, poor Stanley has got himself entangled with someone close to the scandal and as opening night approaches and he realises that Victoria’s parents might be in the audience he is forced to ask himself how real is too real.

Timeframes overlap and collide in this ingenious ontological kaleidoscope of a debut, but the experimentalism — which demands that the reader keep all her wits about her — is tempered by a real knack for narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades.

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton Granta, £12.99; Buy this book; 317pp

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