posted on 07 Jul 2016

Eating People Is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

In the late Fifties and early Sixties a generation of writers including Bradbury, Kingsley Amis and John Wain made a certain type of young, gauche, socially inept anti-hero a popular figure. Not exactly angry young men, more hopeless young men. The university campus also made a popular setting for these books because this was the milieu that these writers most understood.

I remember finding these books seductively amusing when I read them in the early Seventies when they still felt pretty fresh and iconoclastic. Returning to Malcolm Bradbury's story of the exasperating Stuart Treece, an English lecturer in a sad, provincial university I felt confident this was going to be a pleasantly diverting little confection with a touch of acid zest.

Sadly, I have to report that I was pretty badly disappointed. I really don't want to use this word (it feels positively heretical in the context of a work of literature) but I can't come up with anything more accurate - the book is dreadfully dated.

This isn't a plot driven book - nothing much happens. A few painful social or academic gatherings that go cringingly awry, some minor sexual fumbling, plenty of Treece's internal monologue and some jibes at the literary scene of the time. Nor is it character driven in reality - the individuals who people this book are pretty two dimensional and its hard to imagine how they would manage to cope in the real world when they are so loaded with comic stereotype. There's the unlikable working class eccentric who is socially and intellectually untrained and is apt to do the unexpected; the comic foreign student who hides in the toilets; the repressed, middle class, female post graduate; the cocksure up and coming academic etc. etc.

So, if this isn't a book about plot or character what is it about? It seems to me that what Bradbury is trying to explore is the nature of what we might call 'liberal values' - the kind that have bought Treece to where he is and then seem to have trapped him into an ineffectual space from which he can't escape. Treece essentially belongs to a passing age - he has got so used to considering other people's interests and believing in his own second rate standing that he will never be able to seize the moment successfully or understand the emerging 'me' generation.

Bradbury also makes some rather unfulfilled efforts to engage with notions of racism and cultural otherness and he also has a go at outlining some basic positions on gender equality but they never amount to much. These characters end up 'falling in love' every five minutes in a way that wouldn't be out of place in a terrible Edwardian romance but I found Bradbury's attempt to satirize this was way to obvious and clumsy to be really humorous - it just felt silly.

So, all in all, the book is, for me at least, an historical curiosity and one which now doesn't stand comparison with the much more substantial Amis offering, Lucky Jim. I can't imagine I will be rushing back to read this again any time soon.

 

Terry Potter

July 2016