Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

Eating People is Wrong Reviews

• 
  F.R.

  It’s odd that in the afterward to ‘Eating People Is Wrong’ Malcolm Bradbury seems annoyed about the book being perceived as from the same line as ‘Lucky Jim’. One would have thought that having written a modern novel in the 1950s, set in a provincial British university, you’d expect the critics to reach for ‘Lucky Jim’ as a point of reference. Indeed if the comparison was found to be favourable, then your publishers would be skipping with glee at the quotes they could whack onto the next edition. To get stroppy about it just seems like writing a story about an indecisive Danish prince and becoming furious at the Hamlet comparisons. But then, perhaps the reason for this ire is staring at us from the pages of the novel; specifically in the visiting novelist who comes to visit the university and is himself less than happy with the comparisons of his work and that of Amis and Wain. No doubt Bradbury, like this character, thought he was ploughing his own unique furrow and so was irked when people suggested out there may just be, possibly, perhaps something similar out there.
  
  (It also feels odd that ‘Eating People is Wrong’ was publishing the year before ‘Jeeves in the Offing’ by P.G. Wodehouse, which is the last book I read. The two just feel such different vintages that it’s almost hard to credit they entered the world so closely. Now obviously Wodehouse knew his world and it would have been ridiculous for him to start writing like some kind of angry young man – particularly when he was in his seventies. While what would be the point of Bradbury, as a young novelist making his name on the scene, to try and write like The Master? An interesting similarity though: Bradbury crafts a joke, much like Wodehouse elsewhere in a Mulliner story, which relies for a punchline on knowing what G.K. Chesterton looked like.)
  
  Focusing, with digressions, on a distinctly awkward love triangle between Professor Stuart Treece, post-graduate student Emma Fielding and socially maladroit undergraduate Louis Bates, this is a comedy of a certain kind of manners. Treece is the character the novel has most sympathy with, a man approaching middle aged, already fusty and old, and constantly worried about the opinions of society; Bates may feel a little like a proto-Ignatius J. Reilly, but he still clearly comes from a real place; Emma though is the character who struggles hardest to come alive. It’s the big problem of the book that she never quite becomes anything other than a spout for the author’s opinions, never seems a real person and that makes it especially hard to see what everybody else sees in her. (She is seemingly a twenty-six year old virgin, but men from all backgrounds keep falling in love with her.) Treece and Emma struggle with what it means to be a good decent, liberal person in a changing society, while Bates struggles with what it means to be a genius; but all three characters are pushing against the limitations of their world in a university town which seems at points more hide-bound to rules than anywhere else, but also strangely more liberal.
  
  ‘Eating People is Wrong’ is a novel which in its concerns, outlook and manners feels so much like the 1950s. Even ten years later it would have felt somewhat out of time. Some of the didacticism about how people live do go on a bit, while the arguments about personal philosophy become a bit tedious after a while, but this is a novel which understands its world and knows how to be funny about it.
• 
  Jess-i-ca ~Sometimes a Gif Witch~

  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Sue

  My first impression that this was a bit of a museum piece being set in the late 1950's with its references to teddy boys and the new coffee bars. Within a short time however the description of the departmental dynamics and the striving for political correctness became all too familiar! I always blamed Tony Blair but it's apparent that the seeds were sown while he was still in nappies.
• 
  Ashley Marilynne Wong

  This was an extremely entertaining satire. There were so many passages that made me laugh out loud and I was impressed! It was full of thought-provoking, philosophical depth too. A skilful blend of intensity and absurdity indeed.
• 
  James

  'I'm tired of this bar. It's full of sociologists!'
  
• 
  Nicole

  Definitely not all I had hoped. I'm not sure whether it was never a very successful book, or if it simply hasn't aged well, but either way, it didn't work for this reader. It wasn't so bad I wanted to throw it across the room, but I found the characters' central dilemmas -- in particular, a construction of tolerance and liberalism that hamstrings them and keeps them from both meaningful decision making and real relationships with others -- neither funny nor touching. And I think their dilemma needed to be at least one of those. Mostly I found them annoying and stupid.
  
  The book also indulges in what I assume is a typical model for the time of woman as symbol -- outlet and caretaker of men's sexuality as well as his other needs, she is meant to be a certain kind of way (possibly a modification of the DH Lawrence model), and is not quite a person in her own right the way a man would be. Emma does resist many of the claims made upon her, at least to the point where she refuses to marry absolutely ridiculous prospects out of guilt or a "responsibility" to meet their needs, but she continues to spend time with various people I would have told to get the fuck out of my office after about 20 minutes. Bradbury may want to paint that as a concern for others and for community and a kind of laudable liberalism, but to me it just looks like being a doormat when faced with various forms of harassment. If the book had had other virtues, like being funny, for example, I could have overlooked this. But as I found myself in a decidedly unfunny consideration of the author's ridiculous pseudo-dilemmas, I also found the treatment of Emma hard to take.
• 
  Andrew

  "Treece [...] pursued literature intently, seeking to distil from it deeper and more searching explorations of the human fabric, and to preserve at all costs the purity and integrity of thought and art...." (p.227, Arena, 1986)

  
  Treece is a humanist; but a bemused and isolated one, believing that the role of the university (in the '50s) is to inculcate and preserve a set of liberal moral values against the prevalent ethos of profiteering in the outside world (to which, gratefully, he does not belong and is protected from), yet with little comfort in his bemusement but for an older female post-graduate of his, Emma Fielding:
  

  "What I'm getting at," [said Treece], "is how cruel life is in the spheres of it in which you aren't influential. You think you have a protected corner, and you're safe; but once you emerge from it, war is declared. You think life is ideal, as long as you can pursue it along the lines you favour; and then it suddenly comes upon you that it isn't, it's corrupt, that the area in which you are resolute, and make decisions, is so very small. And now and then life goes to work to remind you of it."
  
  "Yes, I know exactly what you mean," said Emma. "The blind, uncontrollable forces of the universe break through suddenly, the great overpowering energies of the world. As in Moby Dick."
  
  "Quite." ... the discussion was affecting him profoundly... (p.65).

  
  For us, this is almost platitudinous; for Treece, our Professor of Liberal Studies (née Literature) at a provincial Midlands university, it is the cornerstone of his bemusement, as the onslaught of a new, brash, over-confident and demanding older student interferes with his established plans of quietude in the delivered erudition of his tutorials. Bates - obviously not deliberately named to be humorous - becomes the bane of his daily life; though his complaint above is his temerity at having to take a driving test for a bicycle with a motor - which I presume a decade later, we would call a moped...
  
  After decades of arriving at a place where manners constitute the very epitome of achievement of society, (not the symphony?) Treece is confronted by this sudden invasive brashness. Bates, of course, is painted as a grotesque: coarse of looks and manners, an overlarge head, too tall, too talkative, too presumptuous, too unrealistically romantic, in a very naïve way; whereas, all Treece wishes to do is stay swaddled in his settled cocoon of isolation from a randomly chaotic and intrusive universe, with laws all unto itself. Who, after all, can blame him? Bates is in love with Emma Fielding - who can blame him?
  
  Emma Fielding believed she had been brought up with middle of the road middle class Christian values - until she took a flat in the Georgian house of the Bishops, who represented a disappearing Edwardian middle-classness who wondered how gentlemen should now cope without servants, since the War seemed to have changed every value they knew; which was believing that it was ok to sin as long as you repented, and that marriage was an institution everybody was equipped for and should be aspiring towards. Emma's own sense of 'normal' middle-classness was radically re-evaluated after she'd taken rooms with the Bishops.
  
  Yet Emma was as much a fair-minded liberal as Treece would have wished for; the problem was, she was 26 and being pursued by the abominable and recalcitrant vulgarian, Bates. Not that Treece did not have affectionate support within the Senior Common Room, where Viola Masefield was entirely sympathetic to him, except that he aspired to living a life according to his liberal humanism, and yet was entirely lost and sad as a result of that heroic endeavour.
  
  Treece, it seemed, could please no one whilst wishing to maintain a core moral liberalism in the world, fostering groups of equally resilient protestant liberals under his temporary care and releasing them into the world as a foil to the increasingly capitalist conservative consuming England, if no longer Great Britain.
  
  Meanwhile, Bates's attempts to honestly yet charmlessly 'obtain' Emma on his side failed at every turn, which persecuted him, but the trouble was, even though she detested the man, it persecuted Emma's conscience as well. The fear, as you read, is that out of some foolish notion of trying to defend her own sense of moral values and decency in her own world framework - which she equably shared with Treece, and with whom she consequently felt at ease - is that she might accept the horrible Bates, though the thought made her, and us, shudder.
  
  Part farce, part exploration of liberal decency as a moral ethos, Bradbury's novel of the rather inconsequential goings on at the provincial university in the '50s are as far removed from real life at university nowadays - with the exception perhaps of the awful parties - that it really only stands up as farce. One likes Treece - in Bradbury's tonal remove - but find little in him except his values of decency and fairness to attract. He is too neutral, takes offenders at arm's length instead of telling them to shut up and go away; and so does Emma. They are very much the same kind of person: fairness is all. And yet, because they are so decently selfless, not only lead relatively aimless existences but fail to feel truly solid and sound as characters. And their quandary in their own existences may be summed up in Bradbury's perhaps deepest metaphysical reflection:
  

  'But the life one leads cuts out all the lives one might have led; one is never a virgin twice; events engrave themselves. Life is a unity to the soul. We meet events halfway; they are part of us, and we part of them; and nothing is incidental. Ahead comes the point where all events exist at once, and no new ones are in sight, the point on the edge of death, which is a reckoning point. It is the motion towards this that one tries to half by crying "Do you love me? Respect me? Will you always remember me?"' (p.189)

  
  This is a comedy of manners which uses too many outdated then-current references (for me, anyway: Wain, F.R. Leavis) to be aptly pertinent, and doesn't punctuate the slow unravelling of this small group of small people's small slice of time and their existential angst in any kind of Woody Allenesque way, in trademark themes about love and death, art and meaning, why we are here and how we use our time and conduct ourselves for its brief span - and underneath all this, reflective of our own loneliness in an uncaring universe, our own need of and search for love and understanding, that tender finger of reaching, of connection, imbued in our heart and mind - which I would have liked it to delve into. To some extent, Bradbury does successfully build his story of this isolated man around these common themes, and these two central bastions of moral conscience, Treece, and Emma.
  

  "Emma's conscience overflowed... we seek ourselves to live in a kind of moral and human suspension; we appoint other people to be the victims. One never quite comes to care entirely for others, for they haven't you inside them, and you are a special case." (pp.263-4).

  
  It is neither a Sharpe (not funny enough), nor an Allen (not deep enough; not funny enough). Yet there is plenty in Malcom Bradbury's novel that strikes deep chords. But perhaps Treece's metaphysical angst is most neatly summed up thus:
  

  "I suffer from this shameful and useless boredom, this complete exhaustion of personality. How can I explain it to you? I lack the energy to carry through any process I conceive. And when I look at all the people in the modern world, and at the way things are moving... then I trust nothing. I simply have no trust or repose anywhere. All is change for the worse." (p.207).

  
  Ennui, oui? But oh, so on the nose.
  
  Bradbury's novel is in similar terrain to Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys [1995], which is also about a professor of English being stuck (there, in writing his magnum opus), but which is far greater fun, and where the characters are themselves much more rounded and full, and the events much more comical; though both novels deal with much the same setting and subject, the latter is funny and fun, whereas this is just pleasantly amusing and diverting. Chabon's plaything might well be helped by being set in more modern times, but it is far more an appealing romp than the limpness and eqivocation that Bradbury's comedy of manners seems to struggle with as a baseline theme. It helps, too, that Curtis Hanson's film of 2000 with the principal (Treece-like) character played by Michael Douglas in his finest part, lingers in the mind alongside one's struggling with Treece and Emma being permanently stuck in a wet paper bag together...
  
  And then Bates, in a comically turned coup de grâce, invites an 'in' poet to deliver a series of talks for the weekend, and the farce deepens, as this new avant-garde 'modernist' insults his audience and seduces them by turns which Treece finds both distasteful and depressing:
  

  "All that Willoughby said of literature was not his literature at all. But in feeling the challenge, he also felt the failure. He had not learned very much. His passage had left nothing. He had never really come to grips with the world, after all. And now it was getting rather too late." (pp.249-50).

  
  Yet for all my prevarication about Treece's prevarications - and, of course, I identify with him by and large - this is a thoughtful novel about serious issues - the meaning of existence and the place of 'art' in that quest to discover, if anything, solutions to that question, and the place of liberal education and universities specifically in endeavouring, against all the changes for the worse, that essential requisite to 'civilised society' - this is a very well written, crafted and argued novel about moral conscience in a world growing increasingly worse, selfish and chaotic. But it is also about loneliness, and love, and more particularly, active love, the act of giving and receiving love, and that in order to enter this domain, one cannot isolate oneself from the outside world without creating the opportunity of finding the luck which might provide this. Treece's very recognition of this fact is salient, in the end, yet Bradbury offers us no clear resolution to his familiar problem. Even when amongst a small enclave of like minds.
  
  This is frustrating, and leaves me unsure - a state I wish myself to escape, through such escapism; I want resolution myself, in this. As Bradbury notes in his afterword (written somewhen in the '70s):
  

  "The liberalism that makes Treece virtuous also makes him inert..." (p.296), and pointedly notes: "It is a sad comedy, perhaps a tragicomedy." (p.297).

  Which it is.
  
  I do not yet know if this is a 'very good' novel, or a 'good' first episode in a trilogy that I must complete... Only one way to find out, really. The History Man [1975] is next...
• 
  Simon

  A brilliant and frequently hilarious satire on academic life and the difficulties of being a liberal professor in 1950s England, Eating People is Wrong takes aim at the staff and students of a provincial university in a way that is biting, insightful and yet affectionate and poignant. No mean feat, that.
• 
  Perry Whitford

  Or, The Toothlesness of the Long Distance Liberal.
  
  Stuart Treece is a wishy-washy professor in an unwashed provincial university in the 1950s which used to be a mental asylum ('There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang yourself').
  
  A nice enough fuddy-duddy riven with liberal guilt, Treece is forty going on sixty, painfully aware of his sedentary instincts and both supportive and afraid of the changing dynamics of the case system in post-war Britain. He becomes interested in two of his students.
  
  Louis Bates is an aspiring working-class writer, a hopelessly gauche yet compelling character who Treece sees as a 'hideous juxtaposition of taste and vulgarity, a native product for the self-made man.' In other words the personification of a moral problem.
  
  Emma Fielding is a postgraduate writing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare while being pestered in turn by Bates and a foreign student called Mr. Eborebelosa. In his own feeble way Treece falls for her too.
  
  The generally sedate pace is enlivened when Treece plays host to a visiting writer, one of the Angry Young Men of the time called Willoughby, who behaves badly in public and privately plagiarizes his material. Direct references to both Kingsley Amis and John Brane at various points leave little doubt about who was being lampooned.
  
  Eating People is Wrong was clearly intended as an antidote to the likes of Room at the Top, Treece the weak-kneed but morally preferable alternative to Joe Lampton. As one of support characters says of him, "Some men go around leaving illegitimate children; Stuart leaves illegitimate parents."
  
  Not so much Lucky Jim as Soporific Stuart.
  Nice chap though.
• 
  Muneera

  Bradbury writes about the things people at a university are thinking but would never say. His writing style and use of humour make this extremely entertaining. At times, I did feel like some of the party scenes were not too enjoyable. Overall, a well-written, fun read.
• 
  Nat

  The title of this book is great.
• 
  Mavis 69 420 666

  Says who?
• 
  Shanelle

  Not really still sure how the title honestly fit the story...
• 
  Andrew

  The university novel is a distinct fiction sub-genre that has several major exponents. David Lodge might be its most famous, however Bradbury must not be too far behind. In 'Eating People is Wrong', his debut novel, Bradbury develops a rather meandering yarn focusing on the emotional, social and intellectual peregrinations of a small group of provincial academics and their students. It needs saying that the story and its characters are not, contrary to the blurb promoting the book, '...timeless and brilliant'; the novel is as a whole amusing, intelligent, perceptive and enjoyable. It is also rather pointless, bound to a very specific time and place, too witty for its own good, and in some ways problematic vis-a-vis its considerations of female characters. Bradbury has written a very good book, but it is not that great.
  
  'Eating People is Wrong' has a languid charm that does in some way reflect the detachment of university life from the nominal hurly-burly of the 'outside' world. Characters such as the protagonist Professor Stuart Treece, the undergraduate Bates and the research student Fielding, and fellow academics including Dr Viola Masefield all are defined by their relationship with higher learning. Nominally exceedingly smart and able to perceive truths about life through the agency of studying texts and those that created them, for the most part they are in fact rather bad judges of human nature and/or fumblers when it comes to the realities of practical living. Treece is the embodiment of this dilatory existence; unsure of his own existence and his place in the great human equation he cannot find any cause for passion, for need, for action. To the detriment of his character Bradbury has constructed Treece as a shell, a bubble, that floats along trying to look and sound important and interesting, yet at the end coming off as rather impotent.
  
  In fact the role of impotence as the underpinning raison d'etre for almost all characters and their so-called development in the narrative seems to be the vital element of Bradbury's story. Almost no one seems to possess any agency, and if they do (as seen in the rather tepid affair between Treece and Emma Fielding) then it's all rather half-hearted. Louis Bates, an older undergrad with academic pretensions born from his anti-intellectual class status and psychological insecurities is a walking talking clusterfuck of a character. He teeters on the brink of humanity only to fall away again and again, never truly retaining the sympathy of other characters (or indeed the reader). The only vibrancy, the only energy, the only power that imposes itself on the lives of these rather grey academics is that from distinct outsiders, such as the cafe dilettantes that Treece meets in the second half of the book, or the 'angry young author' Willoughby who breezes through the provincial groves of academe like a passing hail storm.
  
  Impotence, lethargy, meandering; these are the core adjectives one associates with 'Eating People is Wrong'. It must be admitted it is also moderately clever and at times rather funny. There is a lot of satirical truth as to the avaricious sexual desires of certain characters in the novel; I suspect many a student even today would read of the bumbling efforts at sex and love in Bradbury's novel and recognise their own past experiences. Bradbury also has a way with catching the spirit of campus life as per the confusion and mystery that overseas students experience, or for that matter the occasional naive undergrad. Yes, Bradbury has some problems in how he depicts foreign students in this novel; they almost border on racist stereotypes. However one can at least acknowledge if not accept that this is due in no small part to both when this book was written as well as where and when it is set.
  
  In conclusion 'Eating people Is Wrong is a languid and exceedingly bourgeois novel, heavily rooted in the meandering sense of mild rebellion or satire that Bradbury must have tried to convey if not propagate. I would submit this is not the masterpiece some think it is, and if there was a preferred text in the university novel genre that I would recommend it would not be a book, but the TV comedy drama 'A Very Peculiar Practice'.
• 
  Bill FromPA

  For me, this checked most of the boxes an academic novel should: funny, about how ideas affect (or don’t affect) behavior, uses the campus and its environs as a societal microcosm. It’s very much Britain in the ‘fifties: angry young men, Teddy boys, beatnik wannabes, and, in Stuart Treece, the main character, a man who came of age with ‘thirties radicalism trying to reconcile himself to a welfare state that preserves the stratification of the class system.
  
  Bradbury likes to throw his characters together at parties: we see the different strata interact, get some funny dialogue, see who behaves badly, and find out later who regrets it. The party scenes are not quite as manically entertaining as those in
  The History Man, but work pretty well. Early on Treece holds a reception for foreign students which, as graduate student Emma perceives, highlights the gap between ideal and practice that is to shadow him throughout the novel:

  Poor man, he has tried to show us all that foreigners aren’t funny; but they are. After all, there was one thing that every Englishman knew from his very soul, and that was that, for all experiences and all manners, in England lay the norm; England was the country that God had got to first, properly, and here life was taken to the point of purity, to its Platonic source, so that all ways elsewhere were underdeveloped, or impure, or overripe. Everyone in England knew this, and an occasion like the present one was not likely to prove that things had altered. I have lived in England, was the underlying statement, and I know what life is like.

  There is a memorable scene - it seems somewhat calculated but nevertheless works very well in its context - in which Treece explores the night-side of the provincial town to which the college is attached in the company of a professor of sociology - "with sociology one can do anything and call it work." There is also a chapter - almost obligatory for the academic novel - where a celebrated writer, in this case the poet / novelist Carey Willoughby, comes to campus as a guest speaker and generates a fair amount of chaos; Bradbury uses this incident expertly to highlight the novel's various themes, as with the meditations Willoughby evokes in the college's Vice-Chancellor:

  What he couldn’t understand was this: in his youth he had had opinions, and been regarded as liberal, almost a Bolshie. … Now he had opinions, and he was regarded as a Tory; and what mystified him was, they were exactly the same opinions, so how do you account for that?

  
  The title is a misjudgment: perhaps the Flanders and Swann piece to which it refers was well known enough at the time for its implications to resonate with the book’s themes, but for most later readers, I suspect it has been and will be a source of confusion.
• 
  Chris

  Better was to come
  
  I've previously read "Rates of Exchange" and "The History Man" (though too long ago to properly review) and enjoyed both of them. I enjoyed this too, although was left feeling that more could have been made of it. Written in 1959 it quite reasonably sits within the deep-seated attitudes and beliefs about race and sex that prevailed then, and needs to be read with this in mind.
  
  I would have liked to hear more about the hapless African student, Mr Eborebelosa, a character both funny and tragic, but who was rather left high and dry, and indeed felt all the characters might have been further developed.
  
  At times my attention wandered, particularly when the narrative meandered into meditations on life, but I remained engaged enough to persevere, and to make allowances for the fact that this was a debut novel written at the end of the fifties. There were also passages where I felt some empathy with the characters.
  
  Reading it has made me want to return to the later novels and those not yet read.
• 
  Chris

  I've previously read "Rates of Exchange" and "The History Man" (though too long ago to properly review) and enjoyed both of them. I enjoyed this too, although was left feeling that more could have been made of it. Written in 1959 it quite reasonably sits within the deep-seated attitudes and beliefs about race and sex that prevailed then, and needs to be read with this in mind.
  
  I would have liked to hear more about the hapless African student, Mr Eborebelosa, a character both funny and tragic, but who was rather left high and dry, and indeed felt all the characters might have been further developed.
  
  At times my attention wandered, particularly when the narrative meandered into meditations on life, but I remained engaged enough to persevere, and to make allowances for the fact that this was a debut novel written at the end of the fifties. There were also passages where I felt some empathy with the characters.
  
  Reading it has made me want to return to the later novels and those not yet read.
• 
  Andrew Sare

  Watch out - She's a man eater!
  
  Too much of this book was taken up by an awkward cringe-worthy love triangle/square/pentagon - whatever it doesn't matter. Despite that, Bradbury includes some fantastic reflection about literature, cultural elitism, artists, poets and the willfully numb masses. Unfortunately this is crystallized in only 30 of the 260 or so pages, the rest consisting of the uncompressed rotting vegetable matter.
  
  One of my favorite reflections is made by a snooty writer visiting the protagonist who tells his audience: if you don't love modern poetry - you hate yourself. The explanation being that poets distill the essence and truth of one's modern existence, and that if you don't make an effort to understand them, or if you loath them, then you are actively avoiding learning about your own social condition and yourself- or you hate your life.
  
  I read the book after hearing an interview with writer/editor/critic John Metcalf. The influence of Bradbury's reflection and Metcalf's criticism of modern literature and society is clear and linear.
  
  
• 
  Chloe

  This book is still funny, but it can’t help but be outdated: in its portrayal of women in higher education, class, the welfare state, Britain in Europe. Everything in fact. The sympathy with which the women are written is just that: sympathy because the narrator (a thinly-veiled author, as he admits in his afterword) is a man who thankfully doesn’t have to deal with the complications of being a woman. Clever of him to spot that life is more complicated for women, but not really so terribly compelling.
• 
  Erna

  Humorous commentary on the life of academics in a small rural college in the 50s.
• 
  Andrew Newens

  Good lord this book was awful. Bland, boring and meandering. I couldn’t wait for it to end.
• 
  Salomé Esteves

  Although it had a few highlight-worthy quotes, it just wasn't interesting enough. So, I DNFed it.
• 
  Dermo

  This is so far out of time. I found it very hard to relate to.