'It is a place where savagery knows no bounds. A place where foggy glass windows house a ruthless social hierarchy. A place where no one is truly safe. They call this place...the locker room.
'As teen boys discover a renovated locker room at their school, it becomes the nexus of genuinely life-altering events. Body shaming, bullying, and the cruelty of prying eyes are only the tip of the iceberg inside this cauldron of hormones and developing adolescent minds.
'Akin to the horrors of Lord of the Flies, The Locker Room explores a micro-society without boundaries in which only the strongest survive.'
Oh boy, locker rooms. Does any place within school conjure more awful memories? I know that my own experiences were not the best in them, despite nothing truly awful happening there; but that still didn't preclude people from bullying anyone who was overweight, odd, without the right fashion, or just anyone that the bullies decided to go for that day. And don't get me started about all the internalised trauma of having to spend years in the boys locker room as a trans girl who still hadn't figured her shit out yet. Nightmare fuel.
A story that decides to take a look at this weird microcosm of school life, of this place where tensions are always high, and where there a pretty much never school staff to keep things safe, is definitely a bold move. Within just opening the book the author and artist Timothé Le Boucher lets the reader know that the events in the book are inspired by things that he witnessed and lived through; that the depictions of bullying and abuse he's crafted here aren't too far removed from his own past, as well as the lived reality for many others.
The story begins with a group of school boys being let into their newly renovated locker room for the first time. The walls have been repainted, they've got nice new benches, and the showers have been revamped. Whilst they're initially impressed by what they find they do encounter one glaring issue, their old individual showers have been replaced by a communal one. These young, adolescent boys are terrified by the idea that they'll have to get naked around each other and shower. In fact, they outright refuse to use the showers, and spend the next few weeks going without.
However, as time passes the students are sick of feeling dirty and sweaty after their sports, and when the girls start telling them they all stink someone makes the plunge and uses the showers. After this more of the students begin to, and some lines begin to be drawn between those that shower and those that don't. This isn't the only divide we see in this book, and there are some very clear groups that form inside the locker room, each vying not to be the ones that get picked on by those deemed to be 'above' them.
One kid who falls prey to the bullies more than once is Corentin, a boy who doesn't really have any friends, and whose weight makes him a target of ridicule and abuse more than once. One of his chief bullies is the exchange student Gauthier, who makes it his mission to shame the kid. However, when Corentin discovers something 'odd' that Gauthier is doing in one of the toilet stalls and takes a photo the focus of the bullying changes. Now Gauthier is the one being abused and made fun of, whilst Corentin manages to get in with one of the groups when he suggests new ways in which to harass the boy who once bullied him.
The Locker Room is an odd book in that it wants to take a look at bullying in schools, but doesn't do it in a broader context; instead focusing squarely on what happens in this one room once a week. We don't get to see if Corentin gets picked on during lunch, nor do we see if snide comments are made about people during class. Our only context for things is in this one isolated room. This really works in some regards, and I liked how whenever the story showed us anything from outside we were looking out through the frosted windows of the locker room at these indistinct, distorted shapes. However, it often felt like I was only getting small snippets of the whole, and that whilst the important events might be happening in this one location I was still missing details that would have made things make sense.
For example, we see a pretty sharp change in how the students are acting towards Corenti and Gauthier from one week to the next, as Guthier becomes the target for the bullies and Corentin becomes one of them. There are hints in the dialogue as to what's been going on, but you're very much left to try and fill in the gaps yourself and add your own context. A big example of this is what Gauthier was doing in the toilet that got him so hated by the other students. Before this he seemed incredibly self conscious about showering with the other boys, and kept himself covered as much as he could, that coupled with the photo of him in the stall labelling him as 'revolting' leads the reader to make certain conclusions without actually saying they itself.
I don't know if this is being done from a perspective of some kind of plausible deniability, such as if someone comes to the conclusion that Gauthier was caught masturbating in the toilet and that's why he was made fun of the writer can say 'I never said that, that's your own conclusion' if they ever got called out for having that content in the book. It might also be because to a certain degree it doesn't matter what Gauthier was doing. Having lived through school I can say, and I'm sure you'll all agree, that it often didn't matter what someone decided to make the reason for bullying you; if it was going to happen it was going to happen, and reasons why didn't matter.
I think this is the approach the author is going for, and if so, I think it's the better way of doing this. Readers are able to project their own thought and feelings onto this, possibly drawing from their own experiences; which makes the book feel a lot more personal in some way and will help the reader relate it to their own life.
Though the book is good in a lot of ways there are some areas in which I felt it let itself down, or could cause upset to some readers. The first is that this is a book that focuses on teenage boys, and as such features the boys using horrible language. There are the uses of abelist and homophobic slurs more than once across the book, and whilst this might be accurate for how teens talk it was jarring to see, and did lessen my enjoyment of the book.
The second thing is that whilst there is no male nudity in the book, or at least no full frontal male nudity as most often the boys would be covering their genitals self-consciously, there are repeated scenes where the boys spy into the girls locker room and everything is openly on show. I know that the book is being written from a teen male perspective, and that for most teen males seeing a guys junk is the last thing they want, whilst seeing a girl naked is probably the first, it did feel a little one-sided that naked girls were fine whilst naked boys weren't. The author could have easily conveyed the boys being perverts without showing female nudity.
Overall, I thought that The Locker Room was a well crafted book, one that isn't necessarily heavy on the details, but certainly captures the feel of what its like to experience bullying, and how bullying can sometimes go too far. Bullying is still one of those things that all too often gets brushed aside as not being serious, or is chalked up to 'kids just being kids'. But the simple truth is that bullying is awful, it has long-lasting effects that can stay with a person for decades. It needs to be challenged and called out whenever it happens, and if books like this can help highlight these issues, or encourage people to act differently when it happens, that can only be a good thing.
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