Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrère
Part of the what I'm reading series. Leaves lingering emotional chill, not unlike our UK society.
Emmanuel Carrère's Class Trip (La Classe de neige, 1995) is a frightening, psychologically intense novella that unsettled me more deeply than most thrillers three times as long. While it is short, Carrère packs this tale with emotional complexity, an atmosphere of tension, and a chilling exploration of fear, trauma, and social isolation.
Renowned for dissolving fact from fiction, Carrère is a French writer whose books often explore the tenuous boundaries of imagination and reality, with special reference to psychological fragmentation. Class Trip is simple enough in premise, being about a small boy on a school skiing trip, but it soon becomes a heart-stopping portrait of childhood fear and isolation.
The protagonist, Nicolas, is a twelve-year-old boy whose head already bears a burden of anxiety, much of which he has picked up from his overprotective, paranoid father. The father fills the head of Nicolas with horror stories and danger lurking in every alley, and this fear gets anchored in the head of Nicolas until his imagination gets blurred with realism. One of the most affecting elements of the story is how Carrère doesn’t commit to the reality of the situation until late in the narrative.
The Alpine winter landscape is more than a setting, it's a metaphorical one of the emotional coldness and frailty of the protagonist. The whiteness of the landscape, the isolating chill, and the deadly beauty of the mountains mirror Nicolas's state of mind. It is as if nature and his fear have conspired together to tease the reader more. This ice landscape is not only pretty to behold, but also psychologically suggestive.
As a reader, you’re pulled into Nicolas’s distorted worldview, which reminded me of how people living under systemic precarity, particularly in today’s UK, are often forced to perceive the world as threatening, unstable, and unforgiving. Like Nicolas, such individuals lead lives in states of hyper-vigilance, internal anxiety, and perpetual fear that something might at any moment go extremely wrong. Unstable shelter, unstable income, and isolation create a basis of fear that conditions how the world is experienced. Carrère's description of a scared, isolated child is a grim metaphor for what it means to be vulnerable in a world that offers so little safety net.
Carrère doesn't offer closure or reassurance. Class Trip left me with questions and a residual sense of emotional chill. But there lies the power of the novella: it involves one in the inner world of fear and helplessness so that one can experience an enormous sympathy with all those individuals who live in ambiguity day in and day out. Carrère's work teaches us that vulnerability is not a question of fault of character but often the consequence of situations wherein one ends up.
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