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‘What man is, whatever man is under the eye of heaven, that I burn to know and that – I do not say this lightly – I would endure knowing’ This line was delivered by William Golding in a 1980 lecture titled ‘Belief and Creativity’, where he argued that the knowledge of our deepest nature may not be a precious gift, but a fearful burden A similar insight lies at the heart of Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, a vast autobiographical novel inspired by a horrifying crime that took place in Italy during the Seventies Over the course of twelve hundred and sixty-three pages the novel moves from a detailed recreation of Roman society at this time to a rigorous, even remorseless account of all that is most damaging about male identity In the process, it tests the reader’s own powers of endurance, and might even provoke a few to wonder whether some truths should never be spoken, some confessions left unsaid   In 1975 three wealthy young Italian men picked up a pair of working-class women in their late teens, took them to a villa in the coastal resort of Circeo, drugged them, beat them, raped them, and then attempted to kill them Their inert bodies were later locked in the boot of a car and driven back to Rome, only for the police to find the vehicle, open the boot and discover that one of the girls had somehow survived, lying wrapped around the corpse of her friend Two of the murderers were recent graduates of the Instituto San Leone Magno, a prestigious boarding school run by priests, and their privileged upbringings, along with their links to various far-right movements, resulted in a media sensation which for many came to symbolise the degeneracy of an entire decade Edoardo Albinati attended the same school between the late Sixties and the early Seventies, and grew up in the same neighbourhood as the killers Ever since, the crime has haunted his mind, eventually prompting him to ask how much he had in common with these young men