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language: English
country: UK
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 2.7.25-14.7.25
V.R. Ling’s King Street Run sets out to be a fantasy satire of the impact of “neoliberalism” on The University. unfortunately, it fails on the most basic level to accomplish this goal, as well as being quite bad in other ways. there are many reasons for this, but the most important is simply that Ling has chosen to set it at the University of Cambridge, where she did her master’s and her Ph.D.
the immediate effect of this is that the opening example of what’s meant to be administrative bloat reads not as an effect of “neoliberalism” but as simply the arcane bureaucracy of one of the oldest universities in the world. our rather hapless protagonist, Thomas, an archaeology master’s student, goes to an office to submit a room booking form, where he is told, first, that he needs to submit the form in triplicate hard copy (and that he should have known this from the instructions in the university’s online information system) and, when he asks if he can use the photocopier to make the required copies, that he’s not allowed to unless he’s been trained in how to operate it.
the problem here is that this book appears to be set more or less today, which raises the key question: why the fuck is Thomas being required to submit a hard copy form in triplicate? this feels not like “neoliberal” academic governance but rather like a room booking system that hasn’t changed since 1995, if not earlier, an idiosyncrasy of an Elite University that hasn’t changed with the times. the descriptions of how user-unfriendly the online information system is likewise make it sound not like one of the shiny new content management systems I associate with “neoliberal” administration but rather like a clunky system from 1995 that hasn’t been updated since 2000, meaning that only people who’ve been working at the university since 2000 actually know how to use it. (my own experience with these systems has also been rather the opposite of Thomas’s, namely, that the people who’ve been working at the university since 2000 tend to be apologetic about how clunky the system is and happy, or at least willing, to help guide students through it.)
the equation of “neoliberalism” with “academic bureaucracy” is also strangely executed, which is to say that Ling’s conception of “academic bureaucracy” seems to be “there are department receptionists and facilities managers for different colleges and buildings”. like, I’m sorry, but I just don’t think the museum receptionist exemplifies Evil Bureaucracy! all told, there’s a lot of lipservice to the idea that “neoliberalism” is ruining the university, but very little coherent sense of what “neoliberalism” at the university would entail and how one would meaningfully resist it. when the novel does offer a gesture in the direction of resisting it, it does this by de facto blaming academic researchers for the fact that university boards of directors have turned towards “neoliberal” governance and encouraged bureaucracy. Thomas gives a whole angry speech about it, but it bears little to no relation to either the reality of academia or the portrayal of academia within the novel.
this is all a reflection of the most important problem with the novel’s construction. this is a book that intends to be a defense of academic research, “critical thinking”, and free inquiry, but it situates this defense at one of the most elite and elitist universities in the world. its speculative framing only exacerbates this: apparently, each of the colleges at Cambridge has a living/metaphysical embodiment whose job is to guide and encourage the university’s students, but the rise of “neoliberal” academic governance since the ’90s has disrupted the colleges’ connections with our primary world, pushing them further back in time in the parallel dimension they inhabit. Thomas is enlisted by three of the colleges (“Nick”, for King’s; “John” for St. John’s; and “Trinity”, for Trinity) to find out what’s causing the metaphysical and stop it, in order to reaffirm the colleges as the embodiment of academic inquiry.
which is to say, in its attempt to defend Academia As Such — already a frankly dubious proposition — what the book actually ends up saying is not “academic research and the pursuit of knowledge is inherently valuable and subjecting it to the ideological framework of ‘neoliberal’ academic administration is bad” but rather “the specific Institutions and Traditions of the University of Cambridge must be defended”. (the fact that the colleges all apparently dress like Victorian students underlines this, as do the loving and bizarrely present-tense physical descriptions of the colleges.) this is an entirely different and, I would say, facially reactionary position.
to put this a different way: you would have a very difficult time convincing me that someone who did his undergrad as a nontraditional student at a made-up college in Winchester that’s presumably based on the University of Winchester (formerly King Alfred’s College, here “King Ethelred’s College”, apparently just to set up a joke about Thomas being “unready”) wouldn’t have encountered way more “neoliberal” bureaucracy and jargon at a school that only started awarding independent degrees in 2005 than at Cambridge.
exacerbating this problem is the extent to which the book seems to be, on some level, aware of the problem of Cambridge. we are repeatedly reminded that Thomas is poor and from a working-class community in Essex, that he feels out of place at Cambridge, that his notional peers cannot understand poverty, that he felt like he had to suppress his Essex accent in order to fit in, etc. belying this, however, is the novel’s obsession with, precisely, the institutions, traditions, and eccentricities of the University of Cambridge, which it says — sometimes — are signifiers of elitism but which it clearly feels are just What Academia Should Be Like. the end of the novel drives this home, as in spite of his angry (if incoherent) speech to the colleges Thomas ends up happily ensconced in the specific Institutions and Traditions of the University of Cambridge, up to and including writing ghost stories for his students like M.R. James (who I’ll come back to briefly later).
(making this worse is the disconnect between the novel’s portrayal of Thomas’s poverty and any reality of poverty in the UK or the Global North writ large. Thomas’s phone is illustrative: he has what seems to be a 2000s brick phone with no texting, ostensibly because smartphones are too expensive. everyone I’ve mentioned this to in the UK, Canada, or the US has immediately agreed this is unrealistic. certainly Thomas might not have a new or a fancy smartphone — though even those may be more accessible than Ling seems to realize — but he simply would have a smartphone, even if it were a used smartphone from 2013 with no data plan. it’s very “but poor people don’t have luxuries”, which ignores, first, that having a phone is today an urgently necessary lifeline and, second, that poor people frequently can and do, in fact, spend money on “luxuries”. if Thomas doesn’t have a smartphone, even a cheap one, it’s because he’s chosen not to have a smartphone. my partner’s working-class, immigrant coworkers all have smartphones.
other aspects of the portrayal of Thomas’s background also fell flat. the novel emphasizes that Thomas’s family doesn’t understand or care about his academic interests (in fact a common experience for academics regardless of class), but it, first of all, frames this in gratuitously classist terms —
If Thomas was an outsider to the typical Cambridge student’s life, then going to university made him every bit as much an outsider to his family; they did not ask about his work and he did not force it upon them. It was sometimes alluded to with raised eyebrows, but overall his academic leaning was treated as an embarrassing taboo. Had he dodged university and remained at home, regaling his brother with Saturday night stories about getting plastered at the local pub and throwing up in the neighbour’s rose bushes, then he would receive his brother’s unconditional respect. But as it was, Thomas occupied an awkward cultural purgatory; racked with guilt for being clever and saddled with inconvenience for being poor.
(which. hello??? poor people are all stupid alcoholics, apparently. not helping Ling’s case is the characterization of a lecture hall among admin buildings as “like a bus passenger edging away from the malodorous drunk that had plonked down next to them”. I should also note the casual racism and Orientalism that show up throughout the book, a small but consistent part of the background. one particularly egregious example comes from Thomas’s encounter with the curator of the archaeology museum:
Ignoring the comment, Dr Seton – for this is who the boxes had delivered to reception – blew back her long fringe and gave Thomas a quick smile. There was a long, pink scar running along the top left of her forehead, like a silk ribbon. She brushed her hands together to remove the excess dust before extending one in a handshake.
“Hello Dr—,” began Thomas.
“Oh, call me Rosetta,” she exclaimed.
“Rosetta, thank you,” he responded. “My name is Thomas, I’m an archaeology grad…” He paused. “Do I detect an Egyptian note?” he asked inquisitively. He had a good ear for accents and hers was betrayed by a characteristic ‘eh’ occasionally bridging two words.
“Well heard Thomas, yes – although London has been my home for longer than I can recall. I used to be an interpreter.”
it’s important to ensure that you have pointedly reminded this Foreigner that, unlike, you, she does not really belong here before you have a professional conversation. that she’s named “Rosetta” is just insult to injury.)
— and, second of all, presents this as something that Thomas is surprised by. despite having, as far as we know, grown up with his mother, not only does Thomas seem to be surprised that she and his aunt have never heard of Alan Turing but also he makes no attempt to actually explain who Alan Turing was: “Cryptographer, founder of computer science, his work was critical in breaking the Enigma codes during the Second World War?”
like. first, why would you be surprised by the fact that your mother, who you know, hasn’t heard of Alan Turing; second of all, why would you think “explaining” who Alan Turing was in this way — simultaneously condescending and still relying on specific historical and cultural knowledge — would make anything any clearer? there’s a similar exchange where Thomas casually drops to his brother that M.R. James used to live at King’s, where the fact that his brother doesn’t know who James was seems to be standing as a mark of the Barrier between him and his family, which is simply silly because nobody knows who M.R. James was.)
I keep putting “neoliberal” in quotation marks not only because I’m skeptical of the usual way “neoliberalism” in academia is defined (“running the university like a business”, which is simply not what happens) and, more importantly, because I don’t think Ling really understands what she means by this, because there keep being what are supposed to be defenses of academia that sound like they’re straight out of a “neoliberal” university newsletter:
It’s all about understanding. Understand the psychology of any life form, especially those with whom you disagree, […] and you have the power to build bridges, expand the frontiers of knowledge, and unleash collaborative potential.
like, sorry, but “unleash[ing] collaborative potential” sounds like what university administrators would say they’re doing when they cut two-thirds of the funding for all their language programs and merge the handful of surviving departments into a single World Languages Department with only a quarter of the teaching staff.
the main plot of the book, meanwhile, is, predictably, driven largely by modern Western occultism presented as if it were genuine premodern tradition — most notable is the characterization of apotropaic magic as part of “Wiccan folklore” (which Thomas dates as far back as the 16th century). it’s genuinely baffling that someone with a Ph.D. in anthropology — even if biological rather than cultural — is out here in 2024 taking Western occultism’s invented histories at face value.
the main enemy isn’t even, like, some evil Super-Administrator. it’s a giant gargoyle. at least let them fight the Vice-President for Student Uptrading or something!
all of this is without mentioning the quality of the writing, which is also bad. here’s one example:
To his right was a wide stone staircase. The turned oak spindles of the balustrade were, in deference to the wider design solution, embalmed with a thick coat of white gloss. The paint was flaking off here and there, leaving behind a splatter of jagged, round wooden wounds. It looked as if the past had carried out a drive-by shooting. The paint didn’t suit them. It was like the time Thomas had gone through a punk phase and dyed his brown hair blond. It looked awkward and wrong. Somehow, the chunky handrail had escaped the decorator’s brush and its polished wooden surface gleamed with stately dignity as it sweupt up the staircase.
three different metaphors for the same thing, punctuated by clunky explanations of the metaphors (“The paint didn’t suit them.” yeah, I got that from your admittedly quite evocative metaphor! “It looked awkward and wrong.” yeah, I got that from your first admittedly quite evocative metaphor, the explanation of that metaphor, and then your second, much less evocative metaphor for the same thing!)
here’s another example, shortly afterwards:
Walking up the stairs he smiled at the broad, grey steps, smooth depressions worn into their centre by several hundred years of footfall. There are many such buildings of the University and its Colleges, and it was Thomas’ custom to walk directly in the indentations because, in his own quirky way, he felt he was walking through history.
authorial decisions aside, someone at the publisher genuinely saw “in his own quirky way” and went, “yeah, that seems good!” a few paragraphs later some walls are described as “replate with an ornate picture rail, albeit devoid of pictures”. “replete”!!!!!
now, having said all of this, I will grant that the book does occasionally generate some evocative and/or mildly amusing images and metaphors. Ling’s comedic timing is bad, so she often immediately ruins the joke, but it occasionally comes through. a few of the characters are mildly fun; I appreciated John’s enthusiasm and general vibe.
overall, though, this book was, frankly, a train wreck.
moods: lighthearted, reflective (but not reflective enough)