Blair, it has been suggested to me, is a roman a clef. I can't pretend to have the key, but that doesn’t matter, in the long run. Who remembers the characters upon whom Lucky Jim was based? Who cares? Blair is an amusing novel about English academics stationed in Australia in the past twenty years. Perhaps there really are such characters – anxious readers of the Times Literary Supplement, riders of red Harrods’ bicycles, exiles in a far country, eccentric experts in arcane areas of Eng Lit who carry toothbrushes in their pockets against the chance of intimate contact with alluring undergraduates. It might have been so, some twenty or thirty years past in the major universities, and it probably is so in the far-flung provincial colleges and universities. But John Scott’s novel focuses, to my mind, perhaps too much on these ratbag types.

Geoffrey Dutton assailed similar expatriates in his underrated novel about English adventurers in Adelaide several years past. Dutton’s characters recognised their phony credentials and borrowed mannerisms. but managed to adapt themselves to contemporary conditions. John A. Scott’s characters are more lightly sketched-in, caricatures fleshed out to resemble stock butts of jokes about hopeless Poms in Australian academies. It’s nice that someone has had a go at such space fillers, but I emerged from my reading with a wish that he could have been more acerbic, less inclined to give them characteristics related to muddling through. The world of the novel is too limited to convey a sense of the real issues at stake in Australian academic circles – the desperate plight of the non tenured, the wastage of talent and the contempt for achievement by the native-born. Such matters surface only in jokey remarks by the English-born who occupy English Departments about the pity that so-and-so is not English-born and thus is destined to go chase a career elsewhere.