Shibboleth, set in Oxford, tells the story of Edward, an English literature undergraduate with a vague family connection to Zanzibar. Edward has grown up in a part of England to which things "like quinoa or Ayurvedic medicine" haven't quite made it. While a certain type of fellow student has chosen to study English literature "because he wanted a nice, clear proof of his own ability to read, before surrendering to the cosmic inevitability of a law conversion course", Edward claims his choice of the subject arises merely from his having liked it at school.
Edward is taken up by Youssef, a wealthy Egyptian who uses Islam as an identity, while cheerfully drinking alcohol, eating pork and doing whatever else he feels like. Through Youssef, Edward - who, from a social point of view, is from an average background - is swept up by the children of the wealthy, those who "already used all the right jargon, already knew all the best pubs, already felt in their bones which papers would condemn them to many tortuous evenings in the College library and which would allow them to cruise their way to a first if only they used the word 'hermeneutics' enough times". Soon he is dragged into university politics.
At the beginning of the book, Edward is a bit of an innocent - Chauncey Gardiner kept coming to mind as I read, although Edward is capable of developing - and indeed, inasmuch as the book has a narrative arc, it is the arc of Edward's march towards some kind of semi-maturity. Thus, by the end of the book, having "become aware of the totemic status Palestinians had among people his age", having participated in the college rugby team, having had affairs with two women, having been wrongly accused of masterminding a very small terrorist incident, he has grown up slightly - as much as a caricature can.
For Edward and the other figures Lambert shifts about on his fictional chessboard are not fully formed, nor are they the book's main concern. What Lambert is aiming to do is satirise Oxford student politics - and by extension, I presume, activist politics across Britain and probably the whole of the west. It therefore doesn't matter that his characters are cardboard and their dialogue sometimes clunky - Shibboleth is a kind of literary version of cartooning, an attempt at a verbal Hogarth or James Gillray picture, a portrait in words of a world - or at least a university - gone quite mad and almost entirely anti-Semitic. I do hope it is a highly exaggerated vision, like Hogarth and James Gillray's images, a caricature not a piece of realism.
Lambert has a nice turn of phrase at his best and a good eye for detail. When Edward goes to a poetry reading, Lambert describes the first participant as "a gruesome little haikuist with an earlobe stretcher". Shattering the romantic dream of Oxford so dear to Americans in particular, he describes the city centre thus: "It was a typical weekday in the centre of Oxford: there were homeless people strumming guitars, Muslims preaching from their pergolas." When Edward decides to change from the Shakespeare paper to something more "up-to-date", he is told by his newly-imported-from-America tutor: "Evaluative criticism is over. Themes - that's what you want. Ideas. Frameworks. Critical lenses" and advised that "Academia is a game" and the important thing is to identify the factions, "The Freudians. The digital humanities people. The affect theory lot. The textualists. The Comp-Litters. The people who work with the Department of Continuing Education. The old guys who are listed along with the buildings. There's nothing but factions in this place." At a college dinner, Edward's companions "all foraged in their wallets and one by one pulled out various dietary cards supplied by the College, Youssef with Halal, Conrad with various food intolerances he blamed on the Hapsburg strand of his lineage, and Angelica with a whole five poker hand that covered her newfound veganism, her seasonal eating disorders, the set of rules stricter than any known creed that governed her body." Lambert targets diversity training as often as possible. In the character of Liberty, he creates an ambitious and cunning monster who, despite being indifferent to study and deep thought, will almost certainly rise to the pinnacle of the academic world. To keep us from total despair, he also gives us Professor Burgess, a flicker of hope in the chaos; sadly though, she is old and almost blind.
He also gives us Rachel, a German girl who happens to be Jewish. I wonder if Lambert sees her as his most important character. In a way she is, for the not inconsiderable task of trying to articulate a way through the anti-Semitism in which the world of the book is steeped is given to her. She does quite a good job, but she is really just another mouthpiece for the author. In that capacity, she also provides some amusing commentary on English mores, telling Edward: "Here people lie. They lie like nowhere I've ever been before. They'll make those squealing noises when you walk in the room, and tell you they love your terrible outfit" and questions one of the most unassailable of contemporary shibboleths, the notion of “feeling unsafe”, declaring:
“I think, ‘I feel unsafe’ is just something people have learned to say because it gets the grown-ups to notice them. Most of the Jewish students who say they feel unsafe just say it because it’s the only way they can make their case without everyone calling them a fascist.”
I really admire Europa Editions for publishing something that attacks the fashionable idiocy of pro-Palestine, Islam-loving politics. However, one thing I don't admire the company for is their copy editing - the book is riddled with sentences where words are either repeated unnecessarily or totally left out - and sentences that are inelegantly tangled and in need of further work. Leaving that aside, I recommend Shibboleth. Like all satire it is horrifying - but it is also entertaining. I hope like really successful satire it will change things - but I am not optimistic.
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