Literary Review
University challenged
Shibboleth Thomas Peermohamed Lambert
(Europa, £14.99)
BY chance, the high-water mark of the British campus novel was reached half a century ago this autumn, with the publication of David Lodge’s Changing Places and Malcom Bradbury’s The History Man.
Both books were essentially about the limits of liberalism, but while the Lodge offered a (more or less) comic caper about Atlantic-crossing academics, the Bradbury supplied an immensely pointed account of quite how illiberal “progressive” opinion can be when it starts chucking its weight around, whether inside a university or beyond it.
Shibboleth, a well-reviewed debut by Oxford graduate Mr Lambert here (and technically a university rather than a campus novel) inclines to the Bradbury school of satire. Basically it is a send-up of what right-wing newspapers have come to regard as “wokeness”, and, as such, makes a creditable job of exposing the duplicities, evasions and hypocrisies that certain people who would doubtless regard themselves as pluralists are guilty of in their efforts to pursue such highly desirable abstract nouns as “equality”, “freedom”, “justice” and so on.