Review by Kevan Manwaring of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

Julian Stannard’s slim novel (novella, really) is an excoriating satire of Higher Education. It is also a near-future dystopia, but one told with jaunty gallows humour – try to imagine George Orwell meets PG Wodehouse, if you can, and you’ll be near the mark. Set in an overly-surveilled, debilitatingly techno-demented semi-police state of 2035 (which feels not a stone’s throw from the present day) in the south of England, the titular University of Bliss is a venerable Arts-based HE institution with an ecclesiastical heritage. It charts the ridiculous (mostly) benign dictatorship of the vacuous VC and toadyish Senior Leadership Team: the anodyne initiatives and vacuous doublespeak, dumbing down and bending over for the sacred cow of the "student experience," and endless impositions upon the already overstretched academic staff, who seem to be least vital part of this extractivist factory-farm-food-chain.

It is good to see a book written with rage.

This is a venting of a spleen that many in academe could relate to: a rage against the iniquities of the broken HE sector, and the general inanity of modern life (emails are called "doomails," and the World Wide Web the "Wob"). It made me laugh out loud at times, and there were many great lines that deserved writing down (e.g. "Anodyne is the New Paradigm"; "Simple slogans illuminated the university: Be Good Enough, Reach for the Possible, Read Only When You Feel the Urge, The University Is All About You"; "Freedom of Speech is OK But Watch What You Say!").  

Perhaps this is indicative of Stannard as an accomplished poet – who seems better at turning a good phrase, than writing plot. The comedy here is the driving force, perhaps relentlessly so. There is a strafing of intertextuality and literary in-jokes. It is also very scatological, with a lot of defecating, masturbating, and sweaty saucy seaside-postcard-type shenanigans—a kind of Carry On Academia, mixed with the rough-and-ready humour of the Commedia dell Arte and Punch and Judy. Writing a satire is like making a balloon puppet with spiky gloves – the intention is hard-edged, but the result is often insubstantial. One can imagine this amusing the converted, but never striking the actual targets. It will most likely fall under their radar—a schoolboyish (if erudite and accomplished) in-joke, passed beneath the desk to fellow sufferers.  

The whole religious subplot about the Blessed Aubergine felt irrelevant. Religion is a rather broad target to hit, whereas the ridiculousness, shallowness, and hypocrisy of the HE sector in its current state feels like a more focused, and original target. The characters are lightly-sketched, larger-than-life cyphers for the "types" found in academe, from the cleaner to the Vice Chancellor. We focus most of all on poet and lecturer, Dr Harry Blink, although it seems clear we are not really meant to emotionally invest in any of the characters. There is a climax, when the absurdity reaches its zenith, which could be seen as cathartic, but it is better to just enjoy the one-liners rather than worry too much about "set up and pay off" and other contrivances of fiction.

Overall, it feels like a timely updating of the campus novel, and one that deserves to be read widely in academe – as a "deprogramming" from the modern hallucination that it is under, where it seems teaching is the last thing that "happens" and actual endeavour of education the least valued amid the miasma of bureaucracy and insultingly reductive initiatives focused on cash cow demographics, curricula driven by finance and marketing, "optics," "staff wellbeing," survey results and league tables. The University of Bliss feels like a much-needed enema to all of that.

About the reviewer
Dr Kevan Manwaring is the MA Creative Writing programme leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of Writing Ecofiction (Palgrave Macmillan), The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media (Routledge), Heavy Weather (The British Library), and others. His latest novel is Thunder Road. 

You can read more about The University of Bliss by Julian Stannard on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

The University of Bliss is a dystopian campus novel set ten years in the future and we join this terrifying new world just as new Vice-Chancellor Gladys Nirvana is about to take up her position at The University of Bliss, or UOB (pronounced YOB) as it is known to its students.

In the political climate of 2035, any academic endeavour is strongly discouraged, with the one poor scholar who managed to publish a book being demoted to Head Trolley Pusher on the university’s very own train. As the management seek higher salaries, fewer pesky academics and more bureaucracy, can the last of the humanities lecturers save higher education from itself? Focussing on Harry Blink, the poor poet who hasn’t published any poetry in years, we meet a range of Deans, Pro-Vice Chancellors and Professors whose sole aim is to disassociate higher education from any notion of learning, instead rewarding those lecturers who spend time on their Lego creativity and awaiting the visit of the Weeping Aubergine / Eggplant from the Light of Idaho. Sounds both surreal and scary? Well, it is. 

I managed to read this book in one day, which is a good thing, and at times it made me laugh out loud and other times nod in sad recognition. Yes, it is a bit broad at times perhaps, and certainly you can feel the author’s frustration with the current higher education climate, but anyone working in the Humanities will recognise the tropes that this novel satirises, such as compulsory attendance at events during Staff Wellbeing Weeks instead of doing any research, 87% of students receiving first class honours degrees and the Creative Writing programmes being viewed with deep suspicion and loathing by those in charge. 

Stannard uses to great effect the dystopian device of keeping the near future near enough for us to recognise many of the directives and initiatives but extrapolating them just far enough for the reader to think: yes, actually, that could well happen. We only have to consider the changes the last decade has seen in higher education, the way league table position and awards are trumpeted at open days whilst redundancy policies are rife, leaving a shrivelled team of lecturers to work forty or fifty hours a week to keep up. And, heaven forfend, should there be a fall in the league table, a fall in the NSS, a fall in the REF, the blame is placed firmly back at those same lecturers’ doors – why aren’t they doing more in terms of outreach, pedagogy, knowledge exchange, public visibility, reflection? The move towards obsessions over lanyards and a consideration of whether robotic dogs might do a better (and of course cheaper) job of teaching students than actual people doesn’t actually seem so ridiculous.

But I would stress that this is not just a book for those working in humanities in HEIs across the UK, this doesn’t just speak to that handful of Creative Writing academics who get asked ‘Yes, but what are you employability statisitics like?’ It is for anyone who values education, who values culture, who considers the world their children or grandchildren are going to inherit in terms of learning, philosophy, literature and art. It is a highly readable novel, biting, funny and fast paced, but at the same time, do take a pause every now and then to consider the world Stannard is creating – how close do you think we’re getting to that now?

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023.