Brian's Reviews > Lords of Discipline

"The Lords of Discipline" is one of the best novels dealing with male love and friendship that I have ever read. Mr. Conroy has created as realistic a portrait of young adult companionship and comradely as I have found, to date, in literature. This long novel has many themes and characters, but the text is really about its narrator, Will McLean, and his years at a military college, known as "the Institute."
The strengths of the book are many, but here are a few that come quickly to mind. The voice of its protagonist, Will, is one of the novel's most enjoyable features. Will is articulate, sarcastic, and funny as hell. He is also inwardly shy, unsure of his place at the Institute, in his own circle of friends and relationships, and a man capable of great decency and gross baseness. In short, Will is a boy learning how to become a man. Like all of us, it is Will's interior life that is the most honest and interesting, and it is his moments of introspection where the novel really achieves greatness. However, Conroy has interwoven this high literature with one of the best suspense stories I have seen in recent years. I could not stop reading once I hit the last 150 pages. The novel propelled me along to its conclusion. I had to keep reading, even when at times I did not like what was happening in the text.
Another profound element in the novel is Conroy's evocation of Charleston SC. After Will, Charleston is the most developed character in the text, and it is easy to feel and see the city that plays such an important part in the lives of the characters.
Every once in a while I found Conroy's prose to be flowery to no real purpose, but it doesn't detract that much from the novel, and at times it was breathtakingly beautiful. Another weakness was that the ending lines of the book are straight out of a clichéd film. But it was what the reader wanted, and needed, as a conclusion for this intense novel.
When I left the world this novel created I missed it characters. I think about them, I find myself revisiting them. In this sense, Conroy has created a triumphant work.