‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at home in Oxford, where he spent most of his career teaching, and seems to know all about the professional and psychological complexities of the university. Holt College, his fourth novel, written with dedicated probity and Baedeker thoroughness, is a suspenseful tragedy without a hero — just a few men and women who mean well. Concerned with the administrative deliberations and manoeuvrings of the fellows of a respected, ancient college, the story serves analogically to show how an unscrupulous individual of obsessive ambition and manipulative cunning can turn even the most idealistically conceived democracy into a dictatorial hierarchy. All fellows are created equal but some can become more equal than others.
The villain of this fluently readable piece, one Willoughby Morris, is the elected Principal, Holt’s first among equals, who contrives to dominate the fellowship’s formal and informal proceedings, with the support of two subservient cronies, the Senior Tutor and the Bursar.
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