Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of ‘moral fever’. Here, the ‘giving offence to anyone at all over anything’ is considered ‘a capital crime’; the ‘post-Savile sexual witch hunt’ has trained people to ‘reinterpret heartbreak as violation’; and retribution comes not just in the form of established legal proceedings, but also of the ‘modern madness of amateur arraignment’.
Lawson wants to show how pernicious this culture can be. To do so, he presents us with two characters, both academics, who are out of step with it. Ned Marriot, a media don, is the darling of his university’s history department, vain, adolescent about sex, and a legendary pessimist (‘he adopted a strategy of insuring against ruin by expecting it’). Tom Pimm, also a historian, lacks the professional recognition of Ned (his closest friend), but he is a brilliant and committed lecturer, possessed of the rare distinction of never having slept with any of his students.
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