The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

Title: The History Man / Author: Malcolm Bradbury / Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media / Release Date: 12May 2015 / Rating: 5/5

 

Once upon a time, in the '70s and '80s, the campus novel was a mainstay of British fiction, but even back in the days when a new one was being published every other week, Malcolm Bradbury's humorous tale of the predations of a radical university lecturer named Howard Kirk stood out as something different.

When he's not penning works of popular sociology, Kirk teaches in an aggressive, confrontational way at the gleaming new Watermouth University. And when he's not doing either of those things, he's bedding students and fellow faculty members and stirring ferment in an attempt to relive the Sixties. Meanwhile, his wife Barbara looks for self-realization by having affairs of her own and blasting Howard with her constant complaints.

 

Why is The History Man a classic? It's not just that Bradbury's depiction of “the swinging Kirk scene” bristles with intelligence, although it does. It's also presented in way that that differs markedly from the cosy tone of your average British literary comedy. The narrative is in the present tense, and the story's ironic insights are couched in the sort of chilly, synthetic, shrink-wrapped prose you might expect to encounter in an academic case study.

The result might not be a “good read” in a conventional sense, but it's bracing and invigorating, blowing mental cobwebs right and left. Bradbury describes parties and sexual encounters with an anthropologist's attention to detail. He's brilliant on gender politics, social planning, the menacing inhumanity of post-war architecture, the radicalism of the Sixties (“hate and revolutionary zeal raged; people in the town poked students on the buses with umbrellas”) and the hypocrisies of what we would now think of as the liberal establishment. Tellingly, the Kirk's house is “close to the real social problems, the beach, the radical bookshop … and the rapid ninety minute electric train service up to London”.

Although, as Bradbury himself points out in an afterword, the phenomenon of the trendy radical sociologist was on the wane by the end of Seventies, The History Man remains required reading for anyone trying to demystify the orthodoxies of the political left, and many of its insights still apply – there's a plot thread to do with a proposed visit to the university by a controversial geneticist called Mangel and the students' violent reaction to it which is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine happening today. All of which makes The History Man not just a good book but an important one.