topics: |  fiction | university |

A rambling novel about university life in provincial England - the title is perhaps the most memorable part of the book.

Hailed as a comic novel (see below), the story does not get too many laughs. some characters have strong comic elements - the African chief's son, Eborebelosa, who locks himself into lavatories and wishes to induce Emma Fielding to marry him by promising her "as many goats as she likes", and the dialogue is often scintillating - but the plot meanders and fails to keep interest and the comic elements are diluted by too much humdrum.

The university campus was initially designed as a lunatic asylum - "there was nowhere you could hang yourself". p.20

There are snatches of brilliance every other page, like this observation on how women are cruel:

[Treece and Viola, discussing Louis Bates, often rejected by women]

Treece: Women are so cruel. Think how he must feel.
Viola: Women have to be abominably cruel, Stuart.
	 You know nothing about it.  They are pursued
	 with offers.  It's the hardest thing in life
	 for a woman to face, but she has to do it; she
	 has to hurt, hurt, hurt people all the time.
	 She can't afford to feel sorry for them.

but the whole story fails to hang.

Excerpts

Meaning of "organic"

[Louis Bates, older than other students, with a "large head, moulded in great
pocks and cavities and formed on almost prehistoric, pterodactylian lines",
to Stuart Treece, head of English]

LB: What do you mean, precisely, by organic?
ST: Yes... but is this lets-define-our-terms academicism really important
    at this stage?
LB: When Coleridge called Shakespeare's work "organic" he knew what he
    meant.  But we don't.  ... How are words true?  I mean, we want to know,
    don't we?
    [...]
T:  And so I think, back to Shakespeare.
LB: What happens when you cut off my head? ... I'll tell you.  I die.
T:  I grant you.
L:  But if you merely cut off my feet, I live.  Yet both are
    organic to me.
T:  That's enough of that.  p. 13-15

[The university building used to be a lunatic asylum]
There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang
yourself. 20

Jenkins, the sociologist, hates his name "because it didn't end in
'heim'". 22

[J is just back from US, is disappointed with England]
All the shops are chain-stores, all the local societies are ironed out; soon
it won't be necessary for us to go to America. 23

[Treece] turned and looked around the room, with a tired eye; if all the
chairs had been filled with horses, instead of lecturers and professors
taking coffee, it would have seemed no odder to him. 24

Treece returned to his office, which in the earlier dispensation had been one
of the padded cells.  26

Hiding in Lavatories

[Eborebelosa, son of a chief from W Africa, has a penchant for locking
himself up in bathrooms. ]

T: "You can't go on hiding in lavatories all your life, can you?]
	...
E: English women do not like me.  They despise me because I am
   circumscribed.
   In my country I have four wives.  I do not wish to lie alone.

Emma Fielding is writing a thesis on ‘the fish imagery in Shakespeare's
tragedies.' 30

Treece wished that he did not have to stare, all the time, at pretty
women. 37

Treece was invited by a communist friend to go abroad w him.  later he
hears the friend had gone to Spain, where he died heroically holding a
solitary machine-gun position. When Treece heard all this, he felt that,
if only the man had said he was going to Spain, he would surely have
gone.  Afterwards he wondered whether he would have- from time to time
he certainly wished that he had. 48

[Treece is going for a driving test on a motorized bicycle.]
Ian Merrick, from Philology: "It's an extremely difficult
examination... no one ever passes the first time." 50

Emma and Eborebelosa

[Emma is talking to Treece.  she feels bad about turning down Eborebelosa. ]

Eborebelosa announced that he loved her and wanted to make her his
fifth wife.  He further claimed, she says, that because of some action she
could not identify, she was actually engaged to be married to him.

T: "This is interesting.  I wonder if it was your holding his teacup for him
	at the reception?"

When Emma tells him that she could not marry him, E becomes indignant,
and waving in the air a box, which, he said, contained his grandfather's
skull, which he wanted her to have, he said he was a chieftain's daughter
("Chieftain's son", corrected Emma), that she could have as many goats as
she wanted, that if she wanted anyone killed she had only to say.

EF: You see, there simply is no common ground. ... Yet if one told him what
    one would tell a white person - "I don't love you" - wouldn't it seem
    like an attack on his colour?  And had he been white, wouldn't one
    perhaps have married him?

[she starts to sob]
Treece, watching her body shake with sobs, got up and popped half-way round
the desk; then he thought the better of it, and popped back.  Someone might
come in and catch him at it.
"Now, now," he said from his safe distance. 53

Treece had moved all his possessions into his unfurnished house and it
still looked like an unfurnished house. 61

Viola Masefield

Dr Viola Masefield's flat was not a place where you simply lived; you proved
something.  86

[T and Viola, discussing Louis Bates, recently rejected by EF]
T: Women are so cruel. Think how he must feel.
Viola: Women have to be abominably cruel, Stuart.  You know nothing about
	it. They are pursued with offers.  Look, Stuart.  It's the hardest
	thing in life for a woman to face, but she has to do it; she has to
	hurt, hurt, hurt people all the time.  She can't afford to feel sorry
	for them.  I feel sorry for lots of men.  I feel sorry for you.
T: For me?
V: Yes, of course.  I suppose all women do.  You're a dedicated man.  That
	makes me admire you. But your life is arid, and you know it. 101

T: a vision comes and says: you are a fake, you are nothing.  you are an
	animal and must die.  It's the worst kind of despair.
V: I know, pet, I know.
V put her hands on his forearms and looked up at him with clear grey eyes.

Even as Treece perceived this was a different Viola, simply a woman, he was
kissing her.   He fumbled ineffectually with the back of her dress.  "There's
a zip at the back," Viola said. "You're supposed to find that out for
yourself" She slipped out of the dress.
  "I say, that's a nice brassiere," said Treece.
  "Its broderie anglaise", said V, flattered.  She slipped out of the
brassiere.  102

Why is it that one's mistresses always gives one ties? 152

Women as Loose-fitting men

[EF to T]
It amuses me, you know, the way you seem to see women.  You think of them as
sort of loose-fitting men. 159

[Jenkins to T]
You prefer a good honest western doubt - with all the ineffectiveness and
depression that that entails.  178

[Carey Willoughby, author]
He had written two novels, and the royalties were scarcely enough, as he put
it, to keep him in condoms. 197

[CW drops a raincoat on a pile of books and picks up a twelve-volume set]
my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way
of my becoming a really great scholar. 222

T to EF, about Louis Banks (last lines):
T: I feel guilty about him.  Guilty's all you can feel.  I suppose all you
   can say for us is, at least we can feel guilty. 248

--bio
W:
Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE (7 September 1932 – 27 November 2000) was an
English author and academic.  MA in English U. London (like Treece).  Taught at
U. Manchester, Indiana U, U. Hull, U. Birmingham.  At U. East Anglia, started
MA in Creative Writing - graduates include Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.
author of History Man, also about academia.

bio: oxford comp 20th-c-literature

b. Sheffield, educated at the universities of Leicester, London, Indiana, and
Manchester.  From 1970 until 1995 he was Professor of American Studies at the
University of East Anglia.

His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959), with its university setting
and cast of eccentric characters, usually academics, established the pattern
which his later books were to follow, such as Stepping Westward (1965;
stories), set on an American campus, and the novel Who Do You Think You
Are? (1976). Bradbury won wide recognition with The History Man (1975;
adapted by Bradbury for television), a hilarious satire, set in 1972, of the
fashionable left-wing pretensions of a group of academics at a new
'plate-glass' university; among its characters is the memorably repellent
figure of Dr Howard Kirk, Marxist historian and champion of the Permissive
Society.

Rates of Exchange (1983) explores forms of cultural, linguistic, and sexual
exchange through the medium of its central character, Dr Angus Petworth, a
Professor of Linguistics on a British Council exchange in the imaginary East
European city of Slaka. Cuts (1987) deals with the decline of the Welfare
State and the cuts in higher education which were felt throughout the 19805,
and beyond, in British universities.  Despite its sombre subject, the tone of
the work is essentially comic, and incorporates images of cutting and
splicing associated with the cinematic industry into which the hero, a failed
academic, has been conscripted as a writer of screenplays. Doctor Criminale
(1992) deals with themes with which the author has become increasingly
concerned in recent years — the nature of modern history, and what it is to be a
member of the ever-changing European community.  Bradbury's narrator, Francis
Jay, is a journalist in pursuit of the eponymous and elusive Criminale — an
eminent philosopher with a dubious past — who tracks his quarry across eight
different countries and through a number of international conferences, before
eventually running him to ground. Like many of his earlier works, the novel
is principally a vehicle for ideas, whose humour is derived from its parodies
of academic jargon — particularly that of semiotics— rather than from the more
conventional novelistic attributes such as plot and character writing.

Other works of fiction include Unsent Letters (1988), a collection of
humorous letters to imaginary correspondents, and The After Dinner Game
(1982), a collection of plays for television.

As a critic, Bradbury's specialization is British and American fiction of the
twentieth century, with particular reference to the social and philosophical
implications of *Modernism. Among his critical works are What Is a Novel?
(1969), The Social-Contexts of Modern English Literature (1971), Saul Bellow
(1982), The Modern World (1989), and The Modern British Novel
(1993). Possibilities (1972), No, Not Bloomsbury (1988), and Dangerous
Pilgrimages (1994) are collections of essays. In considering the functions
and values of literature in an era in which the assumptions of liberal
humanism are challenged, he has mediated between the traditions of critical
discourse and recent innovations in literary theory; his misgivings regarding
the extremes of *post-structuralist practices give rise to his humorous
account of a self-deconstructing critic in the fictional My Strange Quest for
Mensonge (1988). He has also edited Class Work (1995), an anthology of short
fiction produced on the creative writing course he ran at East Anglia.

comic tale: blurb

Stuart Treece, a forty-year-old professor and head of English, now rather
set in his ways (Hannibal Lecter is not on his syllabus), is made to feel
somewhat alien by his encounters with a younger generation whose values are
decidedly at odds with his own. In this witty tragic-comedy, the hero's
attempts to come to terms with his new situation are hilariously undermined
when he finds himself instead falling in love with one of his graduate
students, and busily fending off a student rival. Eating People is Wrong
establishes Bradbury's ability to satirize the academic world and to create
the campus novel, as with Stepping Westward and the prize-winning The
History Man. Like its title, the book is funny, true and memorable.

‘The funniest book I have read this year’ Daily Telegraph
‘It is both tough and sensitive, a brilliantly funny book and a really
important first novel’ Sunday Times

‘A sobering, satirical brilliance’ Times Literary Supplement