Hail the bumbling, fumbling conquering hero. Malcolm Bradbury has written a first novel [Eating People Is Wrong] that is sloppy, structurally flabby, occasionally inane, frequently magnificent and ultimately successful. It is as if Dickens and Evelyn Waugh sat down together and said, "Let's write a comic novel in the manner of Kingsley Amis about a man in search of his lost innocence who finds it." The result is one of the most substantial and dazzling literary feasts this year.
Bradbury's novel starts out as a well-made satire of Welfare-State Academia, a genre becoming almost as indigenous to England as Mrs. Gaskell and the three-penny dreadful. About a third of the way through, the novel changes course to become an undergraduate-style lampoon with cardboard characterizations of poker-faced English beats and eccentric, highly-sexed college teachers. The last part of the book redeems all, for here Bradbury shows an increasingly tragic awareness of the comic shortcomings of life once the protective veil of satire is snipped off. This traffic between the clever and the profound, the serious and the flippant is never halted…. It is inevitable that Bradbury's book will be compared to Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim. Both are novels about the deadly torpor of British provincial university life, and the deadly silly attempts to relieve or disguise that torpor. Both open in the same manner….
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