Here's a question worth a chapter in somebody's doctoral thesis: when did the British campus novel lose so much ground to novels about Oxford and Cambridge? For a time, more or less between Brideshead and Blair, academia in fiction was reliably redbrick. These were the years of Lucky Jim and The History Man, of Changing Places and Nice Work. The campus novel was the refuge of satirical fiction. Indeed, it was the best popular genre by far for skewering class prejudice, institutional time-serving and intellectual hypocrisy. In comparison, Tom Sharpe's flat Oxbridge farce Porterhouse Blue seemed too easy, like shooting dons in a barrel.
But recently Oxbridge has started to crop up in publishers' lists with surprising frequency. A cursory look at the past few years yields Sebastian Faulks's Engleby, Ivo Stourton's The Night Climbers, Naomi Alderman's The Lessons, Val McDermid's Trick of the Dark and Linda Grant's We Had It So Good. This year alone brings three debuts: first Ben Masters's disappointing Martin-Amis-on-Cherwell escapade Noughties, and now The Bellwether Revivals (Cambridge) and Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Oxford).
Taking this shelf of books as a sample, you can build a solid template for an Oxbridge novel. A lonely young man or woman becomes attached to the charismatic ringleader of a posh clique, with awful consequences. The clique dissolves, and the protagonist has to face up both to his or her role in its misdemeanours, and to a new life without the group. The exceptions are the Faulks (no clique), the Masters (no charisma) and the McDermid (a straightforward detective story).
It's not hard to unearth the ur-text for the college-coterie-mystery subgenre: Donna Tartt's The Secret History was a New England version of precisely this scenario, and its structure has quickly become default. But many of these recent books – especially those by younger first-time novelists – wear Tartt's influence far too plainly on the sleeves of their secondhand subfusc. So, for instance, Benjamin Wood's The Bellwether Revivals involves Oscar, a lonely young man in Cambridge, falling in with Iris Bellwether and her wealthy undergraduate friends. Iris's brother Eden is a mysterious and eccentric organ scholar who may or may not have discovered how to heal the sick with a combination of occult chamber music and the laying-on of hands, and who has gathered around him a group of admiring disciples who jokingly refer to themselves as the "flock". The Bellwethers and the flock. That's Cantab humour for you.
Wood has a crisp way with a set piece, a good ear for dialogue, and the pacing is nicely handled. He also has an infuriating cartographical bent and can't resist tour-guiding his characters' routes through town. Saving that unnecessary precision, Wood's Cambridge is surprisingly soft-focus. In essence, it's the unpeopled town of haloed lamplight and fogged cobbles familiar from Clive James ("the white opacity came all the way to my eyeballs") and, further back, Christopher Isherwood ("the icy fog which stole out of the marshes into the town"). Wood takes advantage of a predictable fenland mist to move things along, but there's a haziness about the rest of the novel as well that leaves it feeling not quite finished.
Oscar is supposed to be a different sort of protagonist, not a starry-eyed undergraduate but an assistant in a care home. Even he, though, has managed to absorb some genre-specific snobbery, as we learn when he first sets eyes on Iris: "She was not the sort of girl Oscar had grown up around… She had pedigree – that much was clear from her voice." The story demands that Wood's wealthy Cantabrigians should have a certain allure, but his characters never really outgrow this level of caricature.
In the middle of all these close-knit groups, it's easy to forget that universities are places where people spend a great deal of time alone. That experience of isolation doesn't often make it into the popular narrative of student life, but we shouldn't be surprised to find it working itself out in fiction. One thing these recent novels tend to share is an interest in loneliness, in what remains when the wider world begins to strain at the precarious loyalties forged or forced by undergraduate life.
Elanor Dymott's superb Every Contact Leaves a Trace takes that sense of loneliness head-on. Outwardly, her novel bears all the hallmarks of the Tartt school of academic intrigue. Yet past the atmospheric cover and the cordon of epigraphs lies a quite exceptional novel.
What is it that raises Dymott's book so far above the others? It has its secret clique, after all, and its misfit outsider. But it also has a thoroughgoing confidence and ease with the rules of its genre, an appealing way of wearing its learning lightly, and a melancholy perceptiveness that is, to my mind, less reminiscent of The Secret History and its imitators than of Ford Madox Ford's 1915 masterpiece The Good Soldier.
Like the narrator of Ford's novel, Alex Petersen is a recent widower and an unreliable witness, at once profoundly conscious of and troubled by his own unreliability. Some years after graduating, Alex returns with his wife, Rachel, to their old Oxford college for a dinner. At the end of the evening, while they are briefly separated in the college grounds, Rachel is brutally murdered. Alex's narrative, as he knows, is a story, "a version of events… traces and imaginings".
Beginning as a straightforward locked-room mystery, it develops into a delicate meditation on grief and revenge. A few textual traces suggest a conscious debt to Ford; conscious or not, Dymott has contrived a plot that is deeply satisfying without being trite. It's an impressive revision of an old story and perfectly suited to its academic setting. For a university isn't just a place we go to assimilate new knowledge. As Dymott reminds us, it can also be where we go to test the limits of positive knowledge, to learn how to live with the certainty of uncertainty itself.
