Brideshead Rehabilitated

In my mind, I miss Oxford. I miss the width of the streets, the quality of the light, the smell of the Radcliffe Camera LRR. I miss the view of the Dragon School playing fields from my bedroom window, the sandwich shop where I didn't even have to say my order out loud they knew it so well, putting my hair in a high ponytail and feeling smugly academic. The parks, the pubs, the libraries.

So it was with great excitement that I went back on Sunday to visit my best friend R and her brother for tea in the Union. It was a beautiful day for a train journey - clear and crisp with a premature hint of spring. Steaming away from London, snuggled up with a hot chocolate and the Sunday Times' 'Stlye' supplement, I felt like I was leaving horrid, hectic modernity and returning temporarily to the Waugh world of Morris Minors, champagne picnics, naked river swimming and all the other charming attrirubutes of louche undergraduate life between the wars.

Imagine how bitterly disappointing, then, to find Oxford not nearly as nice as I'd remembered it. The buildings are pretty, yes, but that cold biting wind! Oxford has always seemed to have a microclimate that renders it much chillier than yer average town, perhaps because of two rivers meeting there. Or something. I have never been so cold as when I lived in Oxford, when me and everyone I knew would wear at least five layers until mid-July, when it was generally safe to come down to three for a few weeks.

And Cornmarket - urgh. The blandest, ugliest shopping street in Britain, yet full of people even on a January Sunday afternoon. I'm talking Oxford Street levels of people; I'm talking - wait for it - Christmas shopping levels of people. The confluence of two fast food joints in ten metres lends the street an ungodly smell of deep-fried fat - chips, burger buns and chicken nuggets squelch underfoot.

Worse still, far from the Dior-New-Look bedecked gilded youth of my imagination, the students all seemed so... young. Slightly hopeless looking, generally quite spotty, all clutching books about biochemistry to their too-narrow chests. Where were the glorious men declaiming Tennyson and the fillies fainting at their feet? The eminent tutors deep in conversation about the nature of the soul? The champagne corks puncturing the air?

The conclusion I'm forced to reach is that Oxford lends itself to a peculiar, particular type of anachronistic nostalgia. The mythologising around the city is such that it is impossible to see it clearly when you live there, or when you think back to it. It is only by visiting it that you can realise that, yes, it may be the greatest university in the world, but as a town... it's not up to much. And as a fantasy of a town it stands up even less. Or maybe I should've just ignored everything else and gone straight to the Bodleian.

Review of The Lessons

Naomi Alderman’s The Lessons is a dull book about dull people. It tells the story of a group of Oxford undergraduates who fall under the spell of the “mercurial” Mark, have fun, drink too much champagne, leave university and find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the big wide world and the shocking events which pervade it. Or so says the blurb.

In fact, Mark himself never gives much evidence of his oft-discussed charm. He is fractious and pretentious, and his alleged charisma is only to be found in the allegations of it: Alderman seems to think that by repeatedly describing him as “charming” she can get away with providing absolutely no basis for it. The group of students who he invites to live with him in his huge, romantic house are equally falsely lauded. James, the narrator, is a below-average middle-class physicist who is supposedly “beautiful” but whose conversation and observations are so pedestrian as to render entire episodes in the novel obsolete. The best description of him comes from cruel Mark, who tells James “All you ever are is a reflection of other people... What are you really? Nothing. You’re all shadows and mirrors.” The others in the group - highly intelligent Franny, boorish Simon, musical Jess, beautiful Emmanuella - are at best characterised by their interests rather than their personalities, and at worst not characterised at all: all we really learn about Emmanuella, for example, is that she is rich and that she fancies tall blond men.

Wealth is the other problem in the book. In order to bring all the characters together, Alderman has to pretend that Mark is not a snob; yet this seems so unlikely as to be almost impossible. The main force for social hierarchy comes from Mark’s mother, who disapproves of the group because they are not Catholic. But this does not ring true at all: with his millions of pounds, vast estates dotted around the world and giddyingly grand contacts, Mark is significantly posher than all the other characters, yet this does not come into play at all in any of the relationship dynamics, except for one rather feeble effort by Alderman to suggest that James is in Mark’s debt.

Alderman gives the impression of being slightly in love with her characters: the golden-tinted hue which colours their past seems to be all her nostalgia, rather than theirs. There are many dreary passages about staying up until dawn drinking, or giving New Year’s eve parties: but the most naughty thing that ever happens at these events is one episode of marijuana-induced tipsiness. Compared to Gossip Girl or Cruel Intentions, these parties are positively tame. There is no debauchery, no scandal, no fun.

The Lessons is extremely derivative. It draws on Brideshead Revisited, The Secret History, and The Line of Beauty to create a novel which is a hotchpotch of the worst aspects of each. The narrative is pacy, and there are some funny moments, but at every stage Alderman lets slip a detail which suspends our suspended disbelief and exposes a flaw in the basic plot. The novel, like its narrator, is composed merely of shadows and mirrors, always failing to materialise into a believable, gripping story.

This article was first published in The Cherwell newspaper on 21st May 2010