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Introduction by John Boyne

I first met Malcolm Bradbury in autumn 1994 in a place where I believe he felt most at home: a university campus. I had been accepted as a student on the Creative Writing MA that Malcolm and Angus Wilson set up in 1971, the year that I was born, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The reputation of the course had grown quite considerably due to the number of graduates who had gone on to successful careers in publishing and there was a sense in the media that Malcolm had a good eye for new talent. For a young man of twenty-three, to be part of the ’94/’95 intake felt like the beginnings of something thrilling, particularly since it had already been announced that Malcolm was due to retire at the end of our academic year. We would be his last students.

There were twelve of us and we ranged in age, experience and ability. Some had completed unpublished novels and were ready to begin new ones; others, myself included, were still intimidated by the long form and were learning to write fiction through the short story. Each one of us however was passionate about writing and desperate to be good at it; Malcolm’s approval was the touchstone for our self-belief.

I spent the summer before Norwich reading Malcolm’s novels in chronological order, beginning with Eating People is Wrong (1959) and finishing with Doctor Criminale (1992) on the plane over from Dublin. Looking back, it feels like a great shame that only one more novel would be added to his body of work, the time-shifting To the Hermitage, but of course his career was nothing if not busy and varied: he wrote novels, screenplays, literary criticism, television plays, and of course he taught.

My first impression of Malcolm was that he fulfilled my every expectation of what Malcolm Bradbury (or a Malcolm Bradbury-type) would be. He wore tweed jackets, smoked a pipe (in class), glanced around the room every Wednesday afternoon as if he wasn’t entirely sure why any of us were there, smiled at us in an avuncular fashion and nodded while we poured scorn on each other’s work or showered it with extravagant praise. He was often rather quiet at the beginning of a discussion, not wanting to influence us one way or the other with his opinion, but letting us set the tone of the debate, forcing us to be better readers and critics, abilities which would ultimately make us more talented writers. But there was always a moment during class when it felt as if he had heard enough and then his voice would rise, cutting through whatever rot we were spouting, and he would carefully, considerately, but quite clinically explain why a particular story or extract from a novel in progress was not quite working, or why it was, or how it could be improved, or why it should be abandoned entirely. And we twelve would stop, listen, take it in and realize, of course, that he was absolutely right. Because the thing about Malcolm was, and I do not mean this unkindly, that he didn’t really care much about any of us – several hundred students had passed through his course over the years, after all, and he was long past making attachments; some had gone on to greatness, some to mediocrity, the majority had returned to their former non-writing lives – but he cared passionately about fiction, about the novel itself, about the idea that each of us should try to elevate the form and say something in it. He respected fiction in the way that a true novelist must; he understood how thrilling a well-turned sentence or brilliantly executed plot turn could be, how important stories were, how much they could say about the human condition. Above all else, I suppose, he simply wanted us to write the very best novels that we could.