A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier

by Andrew Davies

Dr Stephen Daker returns to Lowlands University, newly elevated to Headthe Medical Centre in the swamp of fear and loathing. But Lowlands has a new American Vice-Chancellor, Jack Daniels. Handsome, blue eyed, virile, he has.a vision of a Brave New University, spearheading the New Knowledge, but also embodying the great eternal values of the Free World. And not only has he the he has the funding too. The medical team respond to new challenges, treating patients for such new ailments as malnutrition, industrial injuries, and Temporary Threshold Loss. Dr Rose Marie, for example, funs a Male Sexuality Workshop which renders its male members incapable of further misdeeds. Jock McCannon, deeply suspicious of the new regime, finds that the sap still flows in his whisky-marinated old bones. AndStephen falls disastrously for Grete Grotowska, the abrasive art historian, an authority on the male nude but a pill in bed.Andrew Davies' comedy is as sharp and funny as ever, but his vision of Britain in the late eighties is an alarming one.Lowlands University was dreadful enough as an exhausted repository of shattered dreams; as an Anglo-Americansuccess it is hilarious but terrifying

Genres: Humor, Fiction

266 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1986

About the author

Andrew Wynford Davies is a British author and screenwriter.

Reviews

[Martin Henson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s not Tolstoy but it is absolutely brilliant. As relevant today as in the 80’s. I had to register this as having been read twice, as GR has somehow scrambled the ISBN number of the second book and records it as the first.

[Bookend McGee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh to write like this.

[Bookend McGee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not the same book as book 2: The New Frontier. Goodreads seems to have merged them.

[Sam Dawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

First re-read since 1988, and glad to say that this remains an enjoyable and often quite acute comic novel, the pleasure of which is added to by the fun it had with the spirit of the times.