Introduction by John Boyne

I first met Malcolm Bradbury in autumn 1994 in a place where I believe he felt most at home: a university campus. I had been accepted as a student on the Creative Writing MA that Malcolm and Angus Wilson set up in 1971, the year that I was born, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The reputation of the course had grown quite considerably due to the number of graduates who had gone on to successful careers in publishing and there was a sense in the media that Malcolm had a good eye for new talent. For a young man of twenty-three, to be part of the ’94/’95 intake felt like the beginnings of something thrilling, particularly since it had already been announced that Malcolm was due to retire at the end of our academic year. We would be his last students.

There were twelve of us and we ranged in age, experience and ability. Some had completed unpublished novels and were ready to begin new ones; others, myself included, were still intimidated by the long form and were learning to write fiction through the short story. Each one of us however was passionate about writing and desperate to be good at it; Malcolm’s approval was the touchstone for our self-belief.

I spent the summer before Norwich reading Malcolm’s novels in chronological order, beginning with Eating People is Wrong (1959) and finishing with Doctor Criminale (1992) on the plane over from Dublin. Looking back, it feels like a great shame that only one more novel would be added to his body of work, the time-shifting To the Hermitage, but of course his career was nothing if not busy and varied: he wrote novels, screenplays, literary criticism, television plays, and of course he taught.

My first impression of Malcolm was that he fulfilled my every expectation of what Malcolm Bradbury (or a Malcolm Bradbury-type) would be. He wore tweed jackets, smoked a pipe (in class), glanced around the room every Wednesday afternoon as if he wasn’t entirely sure why any of us were there, smiled at us in an avuncular fashion and nodded while we poured scorn on each other’s work or showered it with extravagant praise. He was often rather quiet at the beginning of a discussion, not wanting to influence us one way or the other with his opinion, but letting us set the tone of the debate, forcing us to be better readers and critics, abilities which would ultimately make us more talented writers. But there was always a moment during class when it felt as if he had heard enough and then his voice would rise, cutting through whatever rot we were spouting, and he would carefully, considerately, but quite clinically explain why a particular story or extract from a novel in progress was not quite working, or why it was, or how it could be improved, or why it should be abandoned entirely. And we twelve would stop, listen, take it in and realize, of course, that he was absolutely right. Because the thing about Malcolm was, and I do not mean this unkindly, that he didn’t really care much about any of us – several hundred students had passed through his course over the years, after all, and he was long past making attachments; some had gone on to greatness, some to mediocrity, the majority had returned to their former non-writing lives – but he cared passionately about fiction, about the novel itself, about the idea that each of us should try to elevate the form and say something in it. He respected fiction in the way that a true novelist must; he understood how thrilling a well-turned sentence or brilliantly executed plot turn could be, how important stories were, how much they could say about the human condition. Above all else, I suppose, he simply wanted us to write the very best novels that we could.

Almost twenty years later, upon being invited to write an introduction for one of Malcolm’s novels, I chose Eating People is Wrong because it was his debut and every student who has ever attended the creative writing course at UEA, before or since, has wanted to produce their own debut and for it to prove good enough to be published.

Returning to a novel one has read many years before changes the memory of it considerably. Eating People is Wrong had certainly stayed in my mind for I hold affection for the now largely unexploited form of the campus novel but I was surprised by how funny the book still is. On almost every page, there’s a laugh-out-loud joke. (For some reason, I had recalled it as being a little more determinedly political and perhaps dour, but actually it’s quite hilarious.) ‘Did you have an unhappy childhood?’ a lady in a flowerpot hat asks Professor Treece, the forty-year-old Head of English, during an uncomfortable gathering. ‘I had an unhappy maturity,’ comes the immediate reply. Later in the same scene, Treece remarks that he’s not married. ‘I think that’s disgusting,’ she replies brightly. (It’s the ‘brightly’ that does it for me; the perfect word to make the line funnier than it already is.) Even the university itself is established in a building that used to be a lunatic asylum. (‘There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang yourself.’)

The campus novel grew in popularity during the 1950s, not least because of the success of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), but naturally enough most of the young writers attempting the form chose students as their protagonists. Malcolm, who was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote Eating People is Wrong, took a rather different approach, centring his story around a man who is entering middle age, when the frustrations of unfulfilment in every aspect of his life – career, relationships, the part of England in which he lives – are dominant.

Occasionally, it feels very much like a novel of its time. Women are not perceived as highly intellectual creatures – the fact that the graduate student Emma Fielding is writing her thesis on fish symbolism in Shakespeare is played rather for laughs – and marriage, like in Jane Austen’s novels, is still seen as the preferred state. Dr Viola Masefield, one of Treece’s colleagues, is forced to stop wearing dresses with low necklines as they excite one of the students, ‘a matter of pain to her, because she still had a husband to catch’. Similarly, the representation of Mr Eborebelosa, a visiting student from Africa, the son of a chief who is in possession of four wives and an apparently endless supply of goats, borders on the uncomfortable at times for the modern reader. However, Malcolm Bradbury always balances any such concerns with a sharp and sceptical eye at the mores of the era. It’s clear that he’s poking fun at racial stereotypes rather than adding to their number. Emma regrets having lied to Eborebelosa about her relationship status, as he is ‘a member of a race which had been lied to too much already’. Asides like this, placed judiciously throughout the text, suggest a novelist who is dissatisfied with the society in which he is living and is writing about it in the hope that the fiction will subvert the status quo.

One of the more intriguing characters in the book is Louis Bates, a pompous, self-regarding student, uncomfortable with social gatherings, a man whose idea of breaking the ice is to ask how many of the ladies present are virgins. One can’t help but wonder how many Bateses Malcolm encountered over his years teaching in Norwich; at times it must have seemed as if his creations were jumping off the page and applying for places, not in his fiction, but in his real life.

Malcolm Bradbury’s death at the end of 2000 was a great loss to the literary world. He died too soon; there were more novels that should have been written, more young writers who might have benefited from his kindness and generosity. But, for all that, he left us this novel, and The History Man and Rates of Exchange, important books that remain vivid, provocative, funny and moving, novels that will continue to be read.

The benefit (or not) of creative writing courses continues to be debated and, when it is, Malcolm Bradbury’s name is always invoked as the originator, the prime mover behind the notion that fiction is something that can, if not be taught, be nurtured, honed and offered a safe environment in which to flourish. And yet for all that, it seems from this debut novel that even that idea was one that was amusing to him. ‘The question really is,’ asks Professor Treece, ‘are universities the best places for geniuses to prosper? I’m not sure they are . . . they overreach themselves, or they write one of those satirical novels about university life that people keep writing. I hope no one’s writing one of those about us, is he?’

John Boyne is the author of ten novels, seven for adults and three for younger readers. He was a student on the Creative Writing MA at UEA during 1994/95.