Kirjahaku

Buckrack is back He has unfinished business at the University everyone hates to love, but his return to Odium will end in a way that no one could have foreseen. Now in the third term of its annus horribilis, with its third Vice Chancellor of the year, rumours abound that President Trump has instigated a CIA revenge action against the institution whose principal building bears his name. But vengeance is not the only dark motivation on display in the three-day rollercoaster of events which thunders through the final instalment of J. D. Clockman's riotous trilogy. We witness all of Odium's hallmark vices: cynicism and corruption, lust and ambition, betrayal and deceit (not to speak of the seven deadly plot twists of blackmail, homophobia, misogyny, violence, ignorance, vanity and spite). Elfyn Dethbridge, the resentful Deputy Registrar, envisages a way to topple his boss, the abject Nigel Asterisk. James Redman, bereft of his girlfriend, believes that his testicles are becoming mini-zeppelins, and seeks a means of relieving their inflated condition. Will he find it in Drusilla Frost, the overripe, middle-aged PR officer, who embraces her own quest to experience her first orgasm? Why does Robert McNamara, the erstwhile socialist, want to fire five hundred members of staff, seduce his innocent Chinese secretary, and know the contents of the manuals of all the gadgets installed in his luxurious new Vice Chancellorial house? Why does he underreact when a geology professor tells him that the Trump Building may collapse because of the weakness of its own limestone substratum? And why does he overreact when Buckrack reappears on campus?

THE ODIUM TRILOGY charts a complete academic year in the misfortune, decline and fall of a dysfunctional provincial English university. An American Professor arrives at the beginning of term one to take up a research post, but he is not what he seems. He has been hired by the University's ruthless Vice Chancellor to sort out the many problems he has with his enemies among the staff, but we come to learn that he has a mission of his own. His unorthodox methods cause the University to spin entirely out of control, leading to an explosive climax that will haunt it for the rest of the year. Seven deadly plot twists follow, involving blackmail, homophobia, misogyny, violence, ignorance, corruption and deceit. Amidst a welter of comic characters are Nigel Asterisk, the weasel-like Registrar; Avril Poon, the opportunistic Union president; James Redman, her morally upstanding deputy; Robert McNamara, a disillusioned specialist in Politics; Drusilla Frost, the overripe head of PR; not to speak of a femme fatale postgraduate student, a Professor of Arabic poetry who always wears a white suit, a Ukrainian lecturer with madcap broken English, an educationist who gives a lecture which causes an international diplomatic incident, a Welsh malcontent, and one or two notorious leaders of the western world. Clockman's hilarious triple-decker epic encapsulates all the features of the twenty-first century academy: sexual intrigue, thirst for revenge, viciousness, erudite stupidity, hypocrisy, selfishness, egomania, greed and iniquity.