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- Article Title: A romp with Melbourne's literati
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Blair, it has been suggested to me, is a roman a clef. I can't pretend to have the key, but that doesn’t matter, in the long run. Who remembers the characters upon whom Lucky Jim was based? Who cares? Blair is an amusing novel about English academics stationed in Australia in the past twenty years. Perhaps there really are such characters – anxious readers of the Times Literary Supplement, riders of red Harrods’ bicycles, exiles in a far country, eccentric experts in arcane areas of Eng Lit who carry toothbrushes in their pockets against the chance of intimate contact with alluring undergraduates. It might have been so, some twenty or thirty years past in the major universities, and it probably is so in the far-flung provincial colleges and universities. But John Scott’s novel focuses, to my mind, perhaps too much on these ratbag types.
I don’t want to make a welter of this aspect of the novel: I am sure that the slapstick events of the book will charm many readers into savouring many chapters through repeated readings. But the limitation is genuine, insofar as the circle explored is that of a small number of incredible exiles who behave with all the snot-gobbling forelock-touching of the parodic Pom of Australian cartoon depiction of the 1980s, for all their assumed superiority. I must take it on Scott’s word that Melbourne universities and Centres for Human Advancement are staffed by bizarre and insular elitists with no interest in their students beyond the possibility of consolidating sleeping arrangements. I have heard that such things happen in the best-regulated institutions.
The book’s cast of characters includes the hero Eric Blair (yes, of course), the Senior Tutor Bodley E.G., the philosopher Pat Cropp, and the nubile gels with Cavalier names– Celia, Julia, little Sarah Proctor. Others, like the raving mattress-muncher Hymen Proctor, the Anglophile Edward Finchley (the ‘greatest living poet’), Belinda Klein, Blair’s mother Val Prentiss (initials V.S.O.P.), and the plagiarizing teacher Derek Pratt, give the novel the air of a transported staff-assembly from a red-brick university having larks around Melbourne, whose locale is signalled references to the Yarra, Orrong Road, Essendon versus Collingwood, and Port Melbourne. It could happen anywhere, and it probably does.
And what happens? Eric Blair arrives for his interview, gets the job, gathers a reputation for eccentric habits (chain smoking and personal filth, combined with the ability to muddle through his duty-roster with minimal commitment), and wonders about the chance of scoring with the interesting Julia, while his fears and paranoias revolve around stinking feet and dreams of his alcoholic mother coming to visit.
The figures are deftly-drawn, and their interactions portray a creditable range of partner-swapping which is triggered in the opening remarks of the interviewers who greet Eric Blair on the campus: ‘Do you go in for wife swapping?’. Edward Finchley, the great poet and hopeless husband, gives Scott some scope for vignettes concerning poseurs and possessors of bolstered-up reputations. Above all the book is a revelation of the poverty of the literary managers which beggars description by many contemporary writers. It’s to Scott’s credit that he can shaft such pretentiousness so knowledgably, and so entertainingly, albeit with a cast which is largely unrecognizable to outsiders. The book may even strengthen the conviction of many windsurfing readers of Australian poetry that there is precious little in the game but gameyness, and that academics are collectively self-seeking whingers afraid to step into what is sometimes referred to as the ‘real world’. I hope that this is not the case. And I trust that the book will not be regarded as ‘an Australian Lucky Jim' for all its attention to English grotesques. I could wish it went much further, but it’s a sparkling start and it achieves its object – of satirising the complacent and acknowledging that there may be real victims – in a more concise manner than other Australian exemplars of the ‘university novel’.
Scott’s prose is racy – more vernacular and easy in its interlarding of the literary and the irreverently colloquial than much of his verse. The novel leaps from the nineteen-sixties to 1986 with deft passages arranged and titled as dances and counter-dances; the puns, jokes and comic descriptions are genuinely funny, and there are occasional surreal turns of phrase and images. The whole effect can suggest a greater depth than I think the book holds. It’s not one for Lit Crit, but for whiling away a pleasant time. So long as it lasts, it raises greater issues than it teases out, and in this respect, it is as two-dimensional as many of the figures who flit through it.
Academics and writers – particularly those resident in Melbourne’s literary ghettos – will read this book hoping to discover themselves in its pages. They will, too: there are some credible portraits. A wider readership will enjoy seeing all their assumptions about such types confirmed in a clever comic romp.
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