It IS Wrong...

Eating People is Wrong
by Malcom Bradbury

For such a fantastic title and such a great topic as British university life, this book is often a bit of a letdown. Then again I'm hesitant to completely condemn it because it is also often side splittingly funny. To be honest, most of this book will go straight over the heads of those who read it because the majority of the dialog is professors and intellectuals talking about the fundamental problems of being professors and intellectuals in a post-intellectual world...but the rest of the book is those same people, normalized and brought back down to a human level, stumbling through life just about as well (or badly) as the rest of us. I also think many readers are going to be frustrated and perplexed by the lack of action, but if you decide to plug your way through it, just keep in mind that this is not an action book with action characters; it's a book about lonely, sad, over-brilliant, under-socialized university dwellers, ludicrous in their inflated sense of self-importance and crippled by the narrowness of their world. If as the reader I felt a little confined within the story, think how must the characters feel!

This is Bradbury's first novel and it has the jolty feel that most first novels do, but you find yourself intrigued by the slow plots in spite of yourself. There's Professor Stuart Treece, the main character: perplexed by his role as an intellectual in post-war Britain, unable to pass the test to get a bike license, and plagued by his "genius" (i.e. woefully unhelpable menace) graduate student Louis Bates. Bates wanders through the world trying to educate others (mostly by calling everyone other than himself and imbecile), get his poetry published (which no one wants to read until its published and they realize it's good), and falling in love (stalking) his fellow student Emma Fielding. Miss Fielding is unfortunately also the object of lust for an African exchange student, who offers to divorce his other three wives for her and give her his best goat in exchange for her hand, as well as Treece himself with whom she has a brief...well, it can't truly be called a love affair...an intellectual affair involving sex, perhaps?

"It seemed as if his special human situation had somehow sapped him...Outside his own environment Treece's vital force emerged as a small thing that was weak in front of the most eternal human test, whether he was to endure or to die; there is a further edge to alienation beyond which one cases to have a real place in the world, and Treece had found himself more and more pushed toward the fringes of the society he lived in, into a peripheral and invalid existence. What was the poor little humanist to do? The world was fragmented and no Utopia was in sight..."

That passage from the end of the novel sums up Treece's, and indeed many intellectuals' predicament in the mid-twentieth century: they are thinking folk lost in a world that values action, they have no place in society at large, they do nothing and accomplish nothing that the world recognizes a valuable. Treece and Bates both end up in the hospital, the first from a hemorrhage, the second from pneumonia when he tried to impress Emma and nearly drowned in a river. In a final desperate bid to rid herself of Bates, Emma tells him cruelly of the affair she had with Treece and that Bates is an artist and therefore a scapegoat of everything wrong with society, so he should stop fighting his fate and embrace his outcast status. Bates tries to commit suicide, for which he is moved to a mental hospital and set to stand trial.

The sense of non-change carries through to the final words, "She went away, and he lay there in his bed, and felt as though this would be his condition for evermore, and that from this he would never, ever escape."

If you're looking for classic British dark humor, by all means jump into this book. Just make sure you know what you're getting into.