Return to Odium

It’s a new term at campus obnoxious but the many catastrophes related in J. D. Clockman’s The University of Odium have not been entirely overcome. Sir Evan Covet and Jane Blake are no longer with us, and Cannon Buckrack has vanished into thin air, but the legacy of their mischief-making is inherited by those who remain. James Redman is in love, Robert McNamara is in grief, Avril Poon is in high dudgeon, and Nigel Asterisk is in his Trump Building office.However, there are growing tendrils of hope. A new, affable and seemingly professional Vice Chancellor, Archibald Spooner, has taken the helm and seems to wish to restore the institution to something higher than its usual ignominy. Professor William Stoner, a character without flaw who may have slipped into Odium from another fictional world entirely, stalks the campus in his spotless white suits. Drusilla Frost, Odium’s PR hatchet- woman, paradoxically gives one of our protagonists fresh reason to savour life despite his ever-tightening straitjacket of despair. Even the new American President wishes to pronounce his benedictions on his favourite higher education establishment, in the form of cold, hard cash.But this is Odium, and disaster is always just around the next corner. A political controversy erupts from the slightest of irregular events, quickly sucking all the participants into an intra-mural civil war, a maelstrom in a teacup which magnifies into another improbable cataclysm involving the British, American and Chinese governments. Odium is on the skids again, and this time it may not survive into the third volume of an expected trilogy.