Plot summary of another country by james baldwin

At this stage Bennett is not actually a Communist when Judd quotes Lenin's attack on Karl Kautsky, spouting a lot of Marxist jargon in the process, Bennett replies 'Oh, that's bad!', but in a sarcastic tone of voice which implies that he neither knows nor cares what Judd is talking about. Much of the plot revolves around the machinations of various senior pupils to achieve this coveted distinction Judd is virtually alone in disdaining it. His greatest ambition is to become a 'god', school slang for a senior prefect, regarded as the school's social elite. He can see the absurdity and hypocrisy of the public school system and of the Establishment in general, but still wants to benefit from that system. Bennett is a rebel without a cause whose attitudes are rather contradictory. Judd, a committed Marxist, is a rebel with a cause who despises the school and all it stands for. Although they are very different in personality, they are drawn to one another because both, in their own way, are rebels against the system. At the heart of the film is the friendship between Bennett and another student, Tommy Judd. (What shocked British society most about the spy ring was not so much the treachery of its members as the fact that most of them were from well-off Establishment families and educated at the country's most prestigious schools). The film is mostly set in an English public school during the 1930s, based on Eton where Burgess was educated.

Although the closing titles contain the standard 'all characters are fictitious' disclaimer, the scriptwriter Julian Mitchell has never denied that his main character Guy Bennett is a thinly-disguised portrait of Guy Burgess, one of the notorious Cambridge spy ring who acted for Soviet Russia.

Plot summary of another country by james baldwin