Hail the bumbling, fumbling conquering hero. Malcolm Bradbury has written a first novel [Eating People Is Wrong] that is sloppy, structurally flabby, occasionally inane, frequently magnificent and ultimately successful. It is as if Dickens and Evelyn Waugh sat down together and said, "Let's write a comic novel in the manner of Kingsley Amis about a man in search of his lost innocence who finds it." The result is one of the most substantial and dazzling literary feasts this year.

Bradbury's novel starts out as a well-made satire of Welfare-State Academia, a genre becoming almost as indigenous to England as Mrs. Gaskell and the three-penny dreadful. About a third of the way through, the novel changes course to become an undergraduate-style lampoon with cardboard characterizations of poker-faced English beats and eccentric, highly-sexed college teachers. The last part of the book redeems all, for here Bradbury shows an increasingly tragic awareness of the comic shortcomings of life once the protective veil of satire is snipped off. This traffic between the clever and the profound, the serious and the flippant is never halted…. It is inevitable that Bradbury's book will be compared to Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim. Both are novels about the deadly torpor of British provincial university life, and the deadly silly attempts to relieve or disguise that torpor. Both open in the same manner….

Bradbury is also indebted to Amis for the amusing placement of a mild teacher between two aggressive females. In Lucky Jim, the hero succeeds with one woman only when another woman is chasing him. At 40, Bradbury's hero, Treece, finally summons up enough courage to seduce a woman, only to have another woman barge in on them.

Both novels also utilize the same device for their climax. Amis has Jim deliver a speech for the university at an important town-gown affair; the speech is naturally a fiasco of hilariously appalling degree, and Jim sinks to the platform dead drunk. Bradbury gives the speech not to the hero but to a new character, someone not unlike Amis himself, an angry-young-man novelist who has been invited to the university for an important social-literary celebration.

Yet Bradbury is by no means a pilferer. He refers to Amis by name and by allusion…. But when plot incidents are forgotten, Bradbury and Amis are worlds apart. Amis' book ended with Jim freed from the stagnant ocean of convention that engulfs the university town; Jim is on his way to London and freedom. It was a clever escape, an amusing plot contrivance that got Jim his freedom, but as a solution to the problem Amis opened up, it could not be taken seriously: Jim is ready for new picaresque adventures in London, for in never really facing himself, he has kept the possibility of surprise available at every moment. But Bradbury's novel goes much further afield than Amis ever intended. Bradbury progresses from the ridiculous to the tragic, as Waugh did in Vile Bodies. He shows the insane amusements of his milieu only to close with that milieu's lack of resources.

What Bradbury is writing is a morality drama. At 40, Treece begins to review his life and wonders how much of a man he has been. (p. 19)

Treece is supposed to represent the old liberal who no longer "fits" into the new doctrinaire leftism. The political theme however is as relevant or irrelevant as any other part of the bigger question Bradbury is dealing with—the question of commitment…. Treece lacks the sense of commitment which gives meaning to any artist, and … being a liberal humanist, Treece is committed to his virtue—honest doubt—which grows more painful as the years pass.

In any society Treece would be a passive liberal. Just as he is nothing without a society to give him meaning, so he is a welcome, necessary and unnoticed addition to any society he enters. He is the eternal questioner: everyone listens to his questions, but no one tries to answer them, including himself. His questions are never meant to be answered: that is his tragedy….

You may be depressed by the conclusion, but you can also expect some of the brightest comedy in years. Eating People Is Wrong is often foolish; it is more often magnificent, and it certainly marks the debut of a first-rate talent. (p. 20)