While the Sun Shines by John Harding

While the Sun Shines

is a campus novel, but you shouldn't hold that against it: it's actually quite good. The campus novel in England has been in serious decline of late. There's certainly nothing to compare with recent American examples of the genre, such as Philip Roth's The Human Stain, which begins in college, but which is able to obtain an exeat into wider society and culture. The besetting sin of the English, of course, is our bathos, and ever since Lucky Jim, the campus novel has been up to its ears in it: universities are a joke, full of idiot students, sexual predators, misfits, malcontents, and professional time-killers. There are precisely three perfect examples of the form: Lucky Jim itself, Malcom Bradbury's The History Man, and David Lodge in omnibus edition - books which transcend their own limits. Professor Michael Cole is approaching his 50th birthday. He teaches English literature at some nameless "third division" university, and his specialism is John Donne. Like Donne, he is obsessed with sex and death. Unlike Donne, he sleeps with his female students, smokes dope and snorts cocaine. Fortunately, he does not write poetry. One of Professor Cole's students announces: "Fuck me, Professor Cole, fuck me!" The book has some intellectual content and pretensions, but WG Sebald it is not. The Guardian.