The Occupation: A Novel

by David Caute

The Confrontation, 3rd book in series

303 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1972

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surreal, metafictional novel from the leftist historian and underread fictioneer, starring one of those suspiciously self-referential characters, making merry with the sexy line between fact and invention. Or, as the blurb says, “Caute shuffles transparencies of subjective and objective reality so that they overlap, separate and come together again.” A self-pitying professor with a collapsed marriage and a lust for a beauteous student is the most eye-rolling of premises, but refracted through Caute’s bizarre prism of radical student politics, Black Panthers moling for the CIA, and the sexual dysfunctions of an exceedingly depressed academic too old for the hippie movement and too young to fold into the realm of the squares, the pleasures and hilarities abound. The novel is a rambling meta-mess, but stands alone as a singularly weird addition to the brief canon of early seventies British avant-garde fiction.