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. Whether set on campus or not, these stories are seeped in the self-reflecting torment of hermetically sealed academia, deal in suburban loneliness and angst, and generally involve characters who, even if not titularly professors, like Richard Ford’s eponymous Sportswriter, are teaching or living in a similar world.

The current government wishes Oxford were closer to the mainstream of the redbrick. The Lock is a classic Oxford novel getting its feet wet in the mainstream of campus fiction, tiptoeing through dirty realism wearing some very traditional wellies. This is campus drama reinvented as soap opera, with a soap’s eye for detail and a realist’s relish in the naming of everyday things. No more sherry parties here. Instead, after only a few chapters, even the dullest reader will know exactly what wines are on offer in any Oxford Sainsbury’s, and be able to navigate the city afterwards, no matter how much was consumed.