Eating People Is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

Insanely funny depiction of members of the English department at a provincial English university.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literature, Novels, British Literature, Modern Classics, Academia

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[F.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s odd that in the afterward to ‘Eating People Is Wrong’ Malcolm Bradbury seems annoyed about the book being perceived as from the same line as ‘Lucky Jim’. One would have thought that having written a modern novel in the 1950s, set in a provincial British university, you’d expect the critics to reach for ‘Lucky Jim’ as a point of reference. Indeed if the comparison was found to be favourable, then your publishers would be skipping with glee at the quotes they could whack onto the next edition. To get stroppy about it just seems like writing a story about an indecisive Danish prince and becoming furious at the Hamlet comparisons. But then, perhaps the reason for this ire is staring at us from the pages of the novel; specifically in the visiting novelist who comes to visit the university and is himself less than happy with the comparisons of his work and that of Amis and Wain. No doubt Bradbury, like this character, thought he was ploughing his own unique furrow and so was irked when people suggested out there may just be, possibly, perhaps something similar out there.

(It also feels odd that ‘Eating People is Wrong’ was publishing the year before ‘Jeeves in the Offing’ by P.G. Wodehouse, which is the last book I read. The two just feel such different vintages that it’s almost hard to credit they entered the world so closely. Now obviously Wodehouse knew his world and it would have been ridiculous for him to start writing like some kind of angry young man – particularly when he was in his seventies. While what would be the point of Bradbury, as a young novelist making his name on the scene, to try and write like The Master? An interesting similarity though: Bradbury crafts a joke, much like Wodehouse elsewhere in a Mulliner story, which relies for a punchline on knowing what G.K. Chesterton looked like.)

Focusing, with digressions, on a distinctly awkward love triangle between Professor Stuart Treece, post-graduate student Emma Fielding and socially maladroit undergraduate Louis Bates, this is a comedy of a certain kind of manners. Treece is the character the novel has most sympathy with, a man approaching middle aged, already fusty and old, and constantly worried about the opinions of society; Bates may feel a little like a proto-Ignatius J. Reilly, but he still clearly comes from a real place; Emma though is the character who struggles hardest to come alive. It’s the big problem of the book that she never quite becomes anything other than a spout for the author’s opinions, never seems a real person and that makes it especially hard to see what everybody else sees in her. (She is seemingly a twenty-six year old virgin, but men from all backgrounds keep falling in love with her.) Treece and Emma struggle with what it means to be a good decent, liberal person in a changing society, while Bates struggles with what it means to be a genius; but all three characters are pushing against the limitations of their world in a university town which seems at points more hide-bound to rules than anywhere else, but also strangely more liberal.

‘Eating People is Wrong’ is a novel which in its concerns, outlook and manners feels so much like the 1950s. Even ten years later it would have felt somewhat out of time. Some of the didacticism about how people live do go on a bit, while the arguments about personal philosophy become a bit tedious after a while, but this is a novel which understands its world and knows how to be funny about it.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an extremely entertaining satire. There were so many passages that made me laugh out loud and I was impressed! It was full of thought-provoking, philosophical depth too. A skilful blend of intensity and absurdity indeed.

[Nea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I randomly pulled this out of the Booksale rubble - that's how I fish for new titles and find awfully great, great authors - not to mention Andre Aciman, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jean Craighead George.

For 127 pesoses, I was transported to the academic world of rural England in the 1950s. The book's a satire so I somewhat expected it to be a light read, only to be taken aback by the language and the sangkatutak na intellectual refinery necessary (prolly an exaggeration). And it was interesting! This book teems with quotable quotes from page 4 and the characters are funny and crazy in their most peculiar ways. I enjoyed it from end to end.

Many of fellow Goodreaders seem to compare Bradbury's debut to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. Yet, as Bradbury himself puts it: while the comparison was not so surprising, it was not quite what I intended. I began the book well before Lucky Jim appeared, and then wrote and re-wrote it several times during the decade.

Check out his thought profile here: http://www.malcolmbradbury.com/fictio...

On a personal note, it's not really a question of who copies from whom and the whatnots; it's good to enjoy the book for what it is; for the sake of enjoyment (and mind feeding) - which I did with extra giggles and brief gasps in the in-between.

The book exudes with satirical brilliance and hilariously relatable life lessons. Read it!

[Jess-i-ca]

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not all I had hoped. I'm not sure whether it was never a very successful book, or if it simply hasn't aged well, but either way, it didn't work for this reader. It wasn't so bad I wanted to throw it across the room, but I found the characters' central dilemmas -- in particular, a construction of tolerance and liberalism that hamstrings them and keeps them from both meaningful decision making and real relationships with others -- neither funny nor touching. And I think their dilemma needed to be at least one of those. Mostly I found them annoying and stupid.

The book also indulges in what I assume is a typical model for the time of woman as symbol -- outlet and caretaker of men's sexuality as well as his other needs, she is meant to be a certain kind of way (possibly a modification of the DH Lawrence model), and is not quite a person in her own right the way a man would be. Emma does resist many of the claims made upon her, at least to the point where she refuses to marry absolutely ridiculous prospects out of guilt or a "responsibility" to meet their needs, but she continues to spend time with various people I would have told to get the fuck out of my office after about 20 minutes. Bradbury may want to paint that as a concern for others and for community and a kind of laudable liberalism, but to me it just looks like being a doormat when faced with various forms of harassment. If the book had had other virtues, like being funny, for example, I could have overlooked this. But as I found myself in a decidedly unfunny consideration of the author's ridiculous pseudo-dilemmas, I also found the treatment of Emma hard to take.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

'I'm tired of this bar. It's full of sociologists!'

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first impression that this was a bit of a museum piece being set in the late 1950's with its references to teddy boys and the new coffee bars. Within a short time however the description of the departmental dynamics and the striving for political correctness became all too familiar! I always blamed Tony Blair but it's apparent that the seeds were sown while he was still in nappies.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Treece [...] pursued literature intently, seeking to distil from it deeper and more searching explorations of the human fabric, and to preserve at all costs the purity and integrity of thought and art...." (p.227, Arena, 1986)

Treece is a humanist; but a bemused and isolated one, believing that the role of the university (in the '50s) is to inculcate and preserve a set of liberal moral values against the prevalent ethos of profiteering in the outside world (to which, gratefully, he does not belong and is protected from), yet with little comfort in his bemusement but for an older female post-graduate of his, Emma Fielding:

"What I'm getting at," [said Treece], "is how cruel life is in the spheres of it in which you aren't influential. You think you have a protected corner, and you're safe; but once you emerge from it, war is declared. You think life is ideal, as long as you can pursue it along the lines you favour; and then it suddenly comes upon you that it isn't, it's corrupt, that the area in which you are resolute, and make decisions, is so very small. And now and then life goes to work to remind you of it."

"Yes, I know exactly what you mean," said Emma. "The blind, uncontrollable forces of the universe break through suddenly, the great overpowering energies of the world. As in Moby Dick."

"Quite." ... the discussion was affecting him profoundly... (p.65).

For us, this is almost platitudinous; for Treece, our Professor of Liberal Studies (née Literature) at a provincial Midlands university, it is the cornerstone of his bemusement, as the onslaught of a new, brash, over-confident and demanding older student interferes with his established plans of quietude in the delivered erudition of his tutorials. Bates - obviously not deliberately named to be humorous - becomes the bane of his daily life; though his complaint above is his temerity at having to take a driving test for a bicycle with a motor - which I presume a decade later, we would call a moped...

After decades of arriving at a place where manners constitute the very epitome of achievement of society, (not the symphony?) Treece is confronted by this sudden invasive brashness. Bates, of course, is painted as a grotesque: coarse of looks and manners, an overlarge head, too tall, too talkative, too presumptuous, too unrealistically romantic, in a very naïve way; whereas, all Treece wishes to do is stay swaddled in his settled cocoon of isolation from a randomly chaotic and intrusive universe, with laws all unto itself. Who, after all, can blame him? Bates is in love with Emma Fielding - who can blame him?

Emma Fielding believed she had been brought up with middle of the road middle class Christian values - until she took a flat in the Georgian house of the Bishops, who represented a disappearing Edwardian middle-classness who wondered how gentlemen should now cope without servants, since the War seemed to have changed every value they knew; which was believing that it was ok to sin as long as you repented, and that marriage was an institution everybody was equipped for and should be aspiring towards. Emma's own sense of 'normal' middle-classness was radically re-evaluated after she'd taken rooms with the Bishops.

Yet Emma was as much a fair-minded liberal as Treece would have wished for; the problem was, she was 26 and being pursued by the abominable and recalcitrant vulgarian, Bates. Not that Treece did not have affectionate support within the Senior Common Room, where Viola Masefield was entirely sympathetic to him, except that he aspired to living a life according to his liberal humanism, and yet was entirely lost and sad as a result of that heroic endeavour.

Treece, it seemed, could please no one whilst wishing to maintain a core moral liberalism in the world, fostering groups of equally resilient protestant liberals under his temporary care and releasing them into the world as a foil to the increasingly capitalist conservative consuming England, if no longer Great Britain.

Meanwhile, Bates's attempts to honestly yet charmlessly 'obtain' Emma on his side failed at every turn, which persecuted him, but the trouble was, even though she detested the man, it persecuted Emma's conscience as well. The fear, as you read, is that out of some foolish notion of trying to defend her own sense of moral values and decency in her own world framework - which she equably shared with Treece, and with whom she consequently felt at ease - is that she might accept the horrible Bates, though the thought made her, and us, shudder.

Part farce, part exploration of liberal decency as a moral ethos, Bradbury's novel of the rather inconsequential goings on at the provincial university in the '50s are as far removed from real life at university nowadays - with the exception perhaps of the awful parties - that it really only stands up as farce. One likes Treece - in Bradbury's tonal remove - but find little in him except his values of decency and fairness to attract. He is too neutral, takes offenders at arm's length instead of telling them to shut up and go away; and so does Emma. They are very much the same kind of person: fairness is all. And yet, because they are so decently selfless, not only lead relatively aimless existences but fail to feel truly solid and sound as characters. And their quandary in their own existences may be summed up in Bradbury's perhaps deepest metaphysical reflection:

'But the life one leads cuts out all the lives one might have led; one is never a virgin twice; events engrave themselves. Life is a unity to the soul. We meet events halfway; they are part of us, and we part of them; and nothing is incidental. Ahead comes the point where all events exist at once, and no new ones are in sight, the point on the edge of death, which is a reckoning point. It is the motion towards this that one tries to half by crying "Do you love me? Respect me? Will you always remember me?"' (p.189)

This is a comedy of manners which uses too many outdated then-current references (for me, anyway: Wain, F.R. Leavis) to be aptly pertinent, and doesn't punctuate the slow unravelling of this small group of small people's small slice of time and their existential angst in any kind of Woody Allenesque way, in trademark themes about love and death, art and meaning, why we are here and how we use our time and conduct ourselves for its brief span - and underneath all this, reflective of our own loneliness in an uncaring universe, our own need of and search for love and understanding, that tender finger of reaching, of connection, imbued in our heart and mind - which I would have liked it to delve into. To some extent, Bradbury does successfully build his story of this isolated man around these common themes, and these two central bastions of moral conscience, Treece, and Emma.

"Emma's conscience overflowed... we seek ourselves to live in a kind of moral and human suspension; we appoint other people to be the victims. One never quite comes to care entirely for others, for they haven't you inside them, and you are a special case." (pp.263-4).

It is neither a Sharpe (not funny enough), nor an Allen (not deep enough; not funny enough). Yet there is plenty in Malcom Bradbury's novel that strikes deep chords. But perhaps Treece's metaphysical angst is most neatly summed up thus:

"I suffer from this shameful and useless boredom, this complete exhaustion of personality. How can I explain it to you? I lack the energy to carry through any process I conceive. And when I look at all the people in the modern world, and at the way things are moving... then I trust nothing. I simply have no trust or repose anywhere. All is change for the worse." (p.207).

Ennui, oui? But oh, so on the nose.

Bradbury's novel is in similar terrain to Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys [1995], which is also about a professor of English being stuck (there, in writing his magnum opus), but which is far greater fun, and where the characters are themselves much more rounded and full, and the events much more comical; though both novels deal with much the same setting and subject, the latter is funny and fun, whereas this is just pleasantly amusing and diverting. Chabon's plaything might well be helped by being set in more modern times, but it is far more an appealing romp than the limpness and eqivocation that Bradbury's comedy of manners seems to struggle with as a baseline theme. It helps, too, that Curtis Hanson's film of 2000 with the principal (Treece-like) character played by Michael Douglas in his finest part, lingers in the mind alongside one's struggling with Treece and Emma being permanently stuck in a wet paper bag together...

And then Bates, in a comically turned coup de grâce, invites an 'in' poet to deliver a series of talks for the weekend, and the farce deepens, as this new avant-garde 'modernist' insults his audience and seduces them by turns which Treece finds both distasteful and depressing:

"All that Willoughby said of literature was not his literature at all. But in feeling the challenge, he also felt the failure. He had not learned very much. His passage had left nothing. He had never really come to grips with the world, after all. And now it was getting rather too late." (pp.249-50).

Yet for all my prevarication about Treece's prevarications - and, of course, I identify with him by and large - this is a thoughtful novel about serious issues - the meaning of existence and the place of 'art' in that quest to discover, if anything, solutions to that question, and the place of liberal education and universities specifically in endeavouring, against all the changes for the worse, that essential requisite to 'civilised society' - this is a very well written, crafted and argued novel about moral conscience in a world growing increasingly worse, selfish and chaotic. But it is also about loneliness, and love, and more particularly, active love, the act of giving and receiving love, and that in order to enter this domain, one cannot isolate oneself from the outside world without creating the opportunity of finding the luck which might provide this. Treece's very recognition of this fact is salient, in the end, yet Bradbury offers us no clear resolution to his familiar problem. Even when amongst a small enclave of like minds.

This is frustrating, and leaves me unsure - a state I wish myself to escape, through such escapism; I want resolution myself, in this. As Bradbury notes in his afterword (written somewhen in the '70s):

"The liberalism that makes Treece virtuous also makes him inert..." (p.296), and pointedly notes: "It is a sad comedy, perhaps a tragicomedy." (p.297).

Which it is.

I do not yet know if this is a 'very good' novel, or a 'good' first episode in a trilogy that I must complete... Only one way to find out, really. The History Man [1975] is next...

[sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only reason it got the second star is for the DH Lawrence reference and because it got me through work

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant and frequently hilarious satire on academic life and the difficulties of being a liberal professor in 1950s England, Eating People is Wrong takes aim at the staff and students of a provincial university in a way that is biting, insightful and yet affectionate and poignant. No mean feat, that.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eating People Is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury, author of the brilliant The History Man, included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, reviewed on my blog http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... but somehow placed only on the 5748th place at The Greatest Books of All Time site

9 out of 10

Malcolm Bradbury is a favorite author of mine, indeed, my standard ending, some 25 lines at the end, refers to one of his quotes from To The Hermitage https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/09/... and has become criteria for my reading, the ‘fuller people of fiction’ have to be present in the book, or else I take instructions from According to Mark, and act as a vicious king, and banish the personages that do not fit my autocratic rules, and most often, put aside the volume that does not pass the litmus test

One of the characters in Eating People is Carey Willoughby, quite arrogant, obnoxious, immoral, he steals books that our hero would return and/or pay for, but he has some memorable lines, such as ‘His books are about life and how it's lived and, by implication, how it ought to be lived, and why it can't be lived properly anymore...with my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. Problems are not answered, because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world' which is remarkable
Nonetheless, it is contrary to what Magister Kingsley Amis has said ‘I think novels ought to tell a story and have a theme and give you a sense that a problem has been proposed and solved’ – so we have to think of a third great man, Scott Fitzerald and the notion that a good mind can keep to opposing ideas in itself, at the same time…

Professor Stuart Treece, who is forty and head of the department of English at this university, is the main character, and I identified with him, his gaucherie, awkwardness, integrity (see above), and wanted him to be successful in his romantic life, in short, it would have been ideal to get him to be with Emma Fielding, who is doing post graduate studies and works on a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare, she is 26 and handsome
An African student, Eborebelosa, is infatuated with her (love would not be the word, Thomas Mann would explain why) and she wants her to be his fourth wife, for he already has three, and she can have ‘as many goats as she wants’ – at this point, for some reason, I remember a line from The History Man https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/11/..., but we have too many quotes already


Eborebelosa is hiding in toilets, he has not adapted to life in Britain, although racism and discrimination would have something to do with it – he is attacked on the street at one point – he is not the only suitor, there is another peculiar, quite unsavory for some time figure, Louis Bates, who wants Emma Fielding to marry him

Quite soon after they meet, so she lies and says she is engaged to…Professor Stuart Treece, she did not know how to get out of that situation, she is the kind of human who is generous, kind, she does not want to hurt any creature, though she sees that she could not possibly live as the fourth wife of Eborebelosa in Africa
Louis Bates is not a suitable choice either, pushy, annoying, he even threatens to pull the professor’s ears, when he sees they are rivals, and indeed, while Emma lied when she pretended to be so tied to the head of the department, she does start an affair with the latter, this was called a parody of Lucky Jim, a masterpiece

Lucky Jim is one of my top ten favorites https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/... and there are similarities with Eating People, in that both narratives evolve around an university, the main character is gauche, comical, appears destined to lose in front of the less worthy opponents
When Emma and Stuart started having sex, I thought we are on a good path, and what I want, will happen, only this is not what life is, ‘it’s not a beautiful world’, so after a while, when we could hope things will improve, the constraints will be fixed, for they have to hide, he is a teacher and she is still studying

Actually, this will be reason for disciplinary, legal action these days, but we are talking about decades back, in the fifties, the professor does make a move – I see I had to put in a spoiler alert, way back perhaps, but as I keep saying, I am modest, I do not think others really pass the first couple of lines to really read this
He tells Emma he is serious, only to hear her explain – just like Chili Palmer in Get Shorty https://realini.blogspot.com/2020/04/... who said he is ‘the one telling you the way it is’ – that he does not really want to be with Her, he just needs warmth, comfort, not especially from Emma

Alas, the man is sick, he has an ulcer that has reminded me of my own condition, these nights I get up with stomach pains, I have been a sort of champion here, at the age of nine diagnosed with ulcers, then at about thirty, I collapsed, just like Treece, and then the ambulance came and presto to the hospital and ready for operation
They said to me one in three in your state dies, or survives, I cannot remember what were the odds, whatever they were, one in three for or against, it did not look good- however, this is how miracles happen, just as they were about to cut me up and take part of my stomach (this is how bad this kind of procedure is) my sister, who is a doctor in Chicago, told me to stop everything, for they have just started selling medicine that cures this, and for some decades, I was alright…

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or, The Toothlesness of the Long Distance Liberal.

Stuart Treece is a wishy-washy professor in an unwashed provincial university in the 1950s which used to be a mental asylum ('There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang yourself').

A nice enough fuddy-duddy riven with liberal guilt, Treece is forty going on sixty, painfully aware of his sedentary instincts and both supportive and afraid of the changing dynamics of the case system in post-war Britain. He becomes interested in two of his students.

Louis Bates is an aspiring working-class writer, a hopelessly gauche yet compelling character who Treece sees as a 'hideous juxtaposition of taste and vulgarity, a native product for the self-made man.' In other words the personification of a moral problem.

Emma Fielding is a postgraduate writing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare while being pestered in turn by Bates and a foreign student called Mr. Eborebelosa. In his own feeble way Treece falls for her too.

The generally sedate pace is enlivened when Treece plays host to a visiting writer, one of the Angry Young Men of the time called Willoughby, who behaves badly in public and privately plagiarizes his material. Direct references to both Kingsley Amis and John Brane at various points leave little doubt about who was being lampooned.

Eating People is Wrong was clearly intended as an antidote to the likes of Room at the Top, Treece the weak-kneed but morally preferable alternative to Joe Lampton. As one of support characters says of him, "Some men go around leaving illegitimate children; Stuart leaves illegitimate parents."

Not so much Lucky Jim as Soporific Stuart.
Nice chap though.

[Muneera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bradbury writes about the things people at a university are thinking but would never say. His writing style and use of humour make this extremely entertaining. At times, I did feel like some of the party scenes were not too enjoyable. Overall, a well-written, fun read.

[Peggymca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable. Dense, so I couldn't read at my usual pace. English college in the 50's. Not a very good ending, which is explained by the author in the afterword written in the 80's. I'm glad to get the insight the afterword provided. How liberalism leads to inaction. Some of the conversations are really true about society yet today.

[Bookthesp1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite Bradbury - a great read and the daddy of the campus novel

[Nat]

The title of this book is great.

[Shanelle Holt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really still sure how the title honestly fit the story...

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, this checked most of the boxes an academic novel should: funny, about how ideas affect (or don’t affect) behavior, uses the campus and its environs as a societal microcosm. It’s very much Britain in the ‘fifties: angry young men, Teddy boys, beatnik wannabes, and, in Stuart Treece, the main character, a man who came of age with ‘thirties radicalism trying to reconcile himself to a welfare state that preserves the stratification of the class system.

Bradbury likes to throw his characters together at parties: we see the different strata interact, get some funny dialogue, see who behaves badly, and find out later who regrets it. The party scenes are not quite as manically entertaining as those in The History Man, but work pretty well. Early on Treece holds a reception for foreign students which, as graduate student Emma perceives, highlights the gap between ideal and practice that is to shadow him throughout the novel:

Poor man, he has tried to show us all that foreigners aren’t funny; but they are. After all, there was one thing that every Englishman knew from his very soul, and that was that, for all experiences and all manners, in England lay the norm; England was the country that God had got to first, properly, and here life was taken to the point of purity, to its Platonic source, so that all ways elsewhere were underdeveloped, or impure, or overripe. Everyone in England knew this, and an occasion like the present one was not likely to prove that things had altered. I have lived in England, was the underlying statement, and I know what life is like.

There is a memorable scene - it seems somewhat calculated but nevertheless works very well in its context - in which Treece explores the night-side of the provincial town to which the college is attached in the company of a professor of sociology - "with sociology one can do anything and call it work." There is also a chapter - almost obligatory for the academic novel - where a celebrated writer, in this case the poet / novelist Carey Willoughby, comes to campus as a guest speaker and generates a fair amount of chaos; Bradbury uses this incident expertly to highlight the novel's various themes, as with the meditations Willoughby evokes in the college's Vice-Chancellor:

What he couldn’t understand was this: in his youth he had had opinions, and been regarded as liberal, almost a Bolshie. … Now he had opinions, and he was regarded as a Tory; and what mystified him was, they were exactly the same opinions, so how do you account for that?

The title is a misjudgment: perhaps the Flanders and Swann piece to which it refers was well known enough at the time for its implications to resonate with the book’s themes, but for most later readers, I suspect it has been and will be a source of confusion.

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Rather against my better judgement, I took this on having been somewhat underwhelmed by "The History Man" and "Rates Of Exchange". It's better. But still a bit of a mixed experience.
The author denied it was a "campus novel" like the near-contemporaneous "Lucky Jim" or David Lodge's books.......but it's a campus novel. It contains lots of sharp analysis of the way of the world (in 1959) and the difficulties of being a liberal intellectual in a world increasingly driven by materialism and individualism. There are some very funny lines which I won't spoil for later readers.
But, as with the other novels quoted above, for a book by a liberal intellectual there are some staggering dissonances: the attitudes to women, in particular, are more in keeping with a novel of 1859 than 1959. Many cheap jokes and asides about "funny foreigners" take the reader back to 1970s sitcom. And some of the dialogue and the set-pieces, like the last chapter set in a hospital, are just eye-wateringly bad. So read it for the philosophy and the ideas and the wit. Because it isn't great writing. Despite the author running a famous creative writing course.

[Gerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the end of this book there is an afterword by the author, written (I assume) for the 1978 reprint of the book, which gives a real perspective to the book and also explains why I have rated as a three star. In this afterword, Malcolm Bradbury says '(the book) is of its time and very much about its time'. The time in this case being the 1950s. It was first published in 1959.

The story revolves around an English professor at a provincial university in the Midlands and revolves around his immediate associates in the faculty, his students and local literary societies, their guests and parties, their aspirations, interactions and liaisons. The characters seem a bit awkward and clumsy, probably as a result of the times in which they lived and the rapidly changing world since the second world war, before the big social changes of the sixties. The English class structure was still prevalent and modes of conduct and behaviour still very muted by the standards of even a few years after the book was written.

Nevertheless it is full of humour and despite their aforementioned awkwardness, the characters are strong and believable. It just seemed a little too dated for me to recommend.

[Ashley Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

*drum roll* I'm gonna give her a 3.5 !!

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I started out hesitant as it's a comedy written in 1950s England, and I was expecting some distance between myself and the matters at hand. However, I actually found myself laughing out loud and connecting to the subject matter more than I thought I would.

A lot of the themes are timeless. I mean, THESE lines???

"...like most self-destructive people, they see to it that their fate is shared; they destroy other people."

"You see, your feelings must seem to you so much rarer and richer than anyone else's."

"Human beings are very rare things, therefore; most of us are just people."

"Sometimes I feel so remote from other people that I find it hard to believe that they really do exist in the way that I do, as subjects rather than objects."

"Everyone shares everyone else's fate to some extent."

I liked how this book tackled morals, selfishness, depression, self sabotage, and mental health. Twas a speedy read and helped me feel more connected to the human condition and helped me see that some things never change, even after 70 years.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better was to come

I've previously read "Rates of Exchange" and "The History Man" (though too long ago to properly review) and enjoyed both of them. I enjoyed this too, although was left feeling that more could have been made of it. Written in 1959 it quite reasonably sits within the deep-seated attitudes and beliefs about race and sex that prevailed then, and needs to be read with this in mind.

I would have liked to hear more about the hapless African student, Mr Eborebelosa, a character both funny and tragic, but who was rather left high and dry, and indeed felt all the characters might have been further developed.

At times my attention wandered, particularly when the narrative meandered into meditations on life, but I remained engaged enough to persevere, and to make allowances for the fact that this was a debut novel written at the end of the fifties. There were also passages where I felt some empathy with the characters.

Reading it has made me want to return to the later novels and those not yet read.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've previously read "Rates of Exchange" and "The History Man" (though too long ago to properly review) and enjoyed both of them. I enjoyed this too, although was left feeling that more could have been made of it. Written in 1959 it quite reasonably sits within the deep-seated attitudes and beliefs about race and sex that prevailed then, and needs to be read with this in mind.

I would have liked to hear more about the hapless African student, Mr Eborebelosa, a character both funny and tragic, but who was rather left high and dry, and indeed felt all the characters might have been further developed.

At times my attention wandered, particularly when the narrative meandered into meditations on life, but I remained engaged enough to persevere, and to make allowances for the fact that this was a debut novel written at the end of the fifties. There were also passages where I felt some empathy with the characters.

Reading it has made me want to return to the later novels and those not yet read.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Watch out - She's a man eater!

Too much of this book was taken up by an awkward cringe-worthy love triangle/square/pentagon - whatever it doesn't matter. Despite that, Bradbury includes some fantastic reflection about literature, cultural elitism, artists, poets and the willfully numb masses. Unfortunately this is crystallized in only 30 of the 260 or so pages, the rest consisting of the uncompressed rotting vegetable matter.

One of my favorite reflections is made by a snooty writer visiting the protagonist who tells his audience: if you don't love modern poetry - you hate yourself. The explanation being that poets distill the essence and truth of one's modern existence, and that if you don't make an effort to understand them, or if you loath them, then you are actively avoiding learning about your own social condition and yourself- or you hate your life.

I read the book after hearing an interview with writer/editor/critic John Metcalf. The influence of Bradbury's reflection and Metcalf's criticism of modern literature and society is clear and linear.

[Sofia Serralta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It honestly took forever for me to finish but I really liked it. There isn’t a traditional story line but I think that is the point. I found it extremely hilarious and witty (I love dry humor). I loved the characters in the story and the different ways they are explored and developed. When I first started reading this I would have probably described it as a witty commentary on the literary community but I think it is more of a dramatized version of mundane human life with subtle commentary on individual quirks. I do think this is one of my favorite books because I very much enjoyed reading it. I do understand it is kinda niche and difficult to get through but I think it was worth it. I probably would not recommend it to people casually because, as I said, it is niche and probably not the book to get none readers into reading but for me it was entertaining. I would recommend it to people who are avid readers that enjoy subtle humor and don’t mind books with know definable plot.

[David Stabler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this book up in a second hand bookshop. The title intrigued me. My copy was an ancient old penguin, published in 1962 - the pages are brittle, browned, and smell musty. It hasn't aged well. And sadly this is true of the novel itself. What may have been a witty , middle class comedy of manners , set in a sleepy mid 1950s English provincial university, is now just very very tiresomely dated.
Racial stereotypes? Tick. Sexual harassment as an accepted norm? Tick. It's a shame, as there are some good lines and passages, but overall, it is 247 pages of English middle class angst.....

.... or they write one of those satirical novels about university life that people keep writing. I hope no one's writing one of those about us , is he?

says one of the characters. Unfortunately, one of the best lines.

[Raya Kancheva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annoyingly open ended, but wouldn’t have worked any other way. The form was so reflective of the main character, Trece’s, indecisiveness.
A very uniquely female issue was explored with the Emma character and how she was “to blame” for a lot of behaviour that was actually characteristic of the men exhibiting it. I haven’t decided if that was approached by Bradbury in a feminist light or if Emma was truly supposed to be the villain, her connection to the title would suggest the latter…but one can always hope and enjoy the book anyway. Either was, a fabulous read, a lot of personality, very comical - even had me laughing out loud on the underground a few times!

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is still funny, but it can’t help but be outdated: in its portrayal of women in higher education, class, the welfare state, Britain in Europe. Everything in fact. The sympathy with which the women are written is just that: sympathy because the narrator (a thinly-veiled author, as he admits in his afterword) is a man who thankfully doesn’t have to deal with the complications of being a woman. Clever of him to spot that life is more complicated for women, but not really so terribly compelling.

[rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this one.
The characters are a fun little selection of university types, their dialogue can be a little pit poncy but fun to read nonetheless. There's often moments where the author/protagonist has a little ponder about how little he commits to living and reserves himself to be reserved and the effect that has on his ability to consider himself a participant in the world, which I enjoyed.
Louis Bates is also so hilariously what Emma refers to as a "whipping boy" that even if you want to feel bad for him, you can't.
maybe 3 1/2 not sure how skewed my ratings are yet