Book of the Month: A Significant Experience

 

A Significant Experience is a long-forgotten novel by Gwyn Griffin that contains one of the most graphic caning scenes in any ‘mainstream’ novel.

Cadet Van der Haar has been chosen for a special military Intelligence mission in Syria, but he is only seventeen years old and must wait until he is eighteen before he can go. To wait out his time he is posted to Egypt but his superiors there think he doesn’t know how to behave like a soldier. One says if he had been at Sandhurst Military College in England, he ‘would have a very sore behind and deservedly so.’ So, they decide he should receive a ‘sound beating.’

A review of the book published in American newspapers when it was published in 1963 noted the caning is ordered by an officer of homosexual tendencies whose advances have been spurned by the cadet. The punishment itself is ordered on a bet among the regular officers who want to test a permissive loophole in Army regulations.

‘The caning scene, the “significant experience” of the title is staged with full military ritual amid almost unbearable suspense … the boy held down by the NCOs, the sadistic officers lined up to witness what one of them calls “an amusing tactical exercise in psychology”.’

Scroll down to read the full review.

 

Here is an extract from the book:

Extracted from A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffiths, published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1963

As published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Kentucky, US, 8 September 1963

For extracts from novels, click here

 

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