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...