Down to the last detail

One might assume that the Oxford novel, like some long-delayed train finally pulling into Paddington, has run its course. Bright young things flee back into their stately towers as tourists prowl the streets in search of Sebastian Flyte and his chums. But today’s Oxford student is just as likely to be commuting from London in search of the MBA degree that will allow him to take over the rail network. Moreover, readers of the most successful Oxford fiction of recent years expect a city littered with corpses, with opera echoing among the spires as Inspector Morse sorts out the killers from a very different set of dons.

Academic fiction has life beyond Oxford, unlikely as that may seem. American campus novels, like Jane Smiley’s Moo, show the redbrick influence of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. The writing known as ‘dirty realism’, first labelled in Granta, is actually a sub-genre of the campus novel.