Book: Crump
Crump by P.J. Vanston is, according to the cover, a “darkly comic and scathing satire about life at a modern British university”. The book tells the story of Kevin Crump, newly appointed lecturer at the fictional Thames Metropolitain University, conveniently located in the buildings of the actual University of Greenwich. From page one, the book is indeed scathing: a scathing attack on “modern universities”, political correctness and university life in Britain in the 21st century. The reader is taken for a fast paced ride of ever more insane stories, involving anything from a transexual head of department (for the sake of the career of course!), academics running degree mills in developing countries, equal opportunity trainers beating up white guys and the main character being raped by a fellow male colleague after being beaten up by protestors on campus… All in all, the action unfolding is faster paced than light – and just when I thought that now the author really had told the most absurd story possible, he manages to bring out an even more absurd one, keeping me reading. The pure ridiculousness and pace of the storyline, however, is also the books big downfall: Few characters are well developed, no storyline is advanced before it gets taken over by the next one – and full of stereotypical, underdeveloped representations of students, staff and just about everyone involved in the higher education system – making “a normal” tabloid story look positively civilised. If you are addicted to Channel 4’s Campus series, but find it all a little bit too normal and toned down on TV, then I suspect you may enjoy the book. Otherwise, even the currently discounted price of £5.91 on Amazon (regular price £7.99) seems quite a hefty price to pay – especially, with more intelligent and funny campus novels like Degrees ‘R Us being much cheaper (when you own a Kindle!).
I disagree. This campus novel is IMHO way funnier than Campus Conspiracy and Degrees R Us which portray an upper-class wealthy professor (a theologian who knows the Archbishop of Canterbury and is married to an aristocrat, no less) so few people can relate to it at all. Those books were OK, but a bit meaningless; Crump is way better and dares to do stuff like portray Muslim extremists.
I would say the portrayals in Crump are not at all stereotypical – the way the Indian character Raj is shown is the opposite of stereotype I’d say – and certainly the characters and plot are as developed as those in Degree R Us, though larger than life. This is called ‘reductio ad absurdum’. It’s not meant to be documentary realism, I think, and so if you read it for that, you’ll be disappointed, but the impression it gives is really not far off what I had to put up with when a lecturer, and some of the characters are spot-on, even if they are insane.
I paid less than £3 for my copy on Amazon and second hand it’s 99p, so maybe you paid too much for it? I have also seen the text free on Googlebooks, so can’t really complain about that!
I would also say the storylines are fast-paced yes, but interlinked really well. I have a hatred of books that tell no story and go nowhere – and this moves at a fast pace, which I liked.
As a former lecturer appalled by the political correctness and dumbing down of degree factories called universities, I loved it; but if I still worked in Higher Education, I might well be a bit offended, which is perhaps the reason for your negative review of this highly enjoyable and gutsy novel, one which makes others you mention look limp as lettuce.
Also, TV’s Campus was not funny at all; Crump most definitely is, though the humour is very dark. I thought it too long in places + a bit too polemical sometimes, but it’s the best of the bunch IMHO. I found out about this novel here: http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=4446
Apparently it’s a set book in Scandinavian colleges now, so my contacts in Norway tell me.