Bluffworld

Patrick Evans 

Victoria University Press

Otago Daily Times, March 27th 2021

Thomas Flannery (MA, DL) was once a tenured faculty member in the English Department of an unnamed Antipodean University with Oxfordian pretensions. But this once-secure bastion of intellectual elitism has, like Colleges of Art the world over, been deemed a threat to management and restructured out of existence. Now Tom spends his days stocking a colleague’s secondhand bookshop with the remnants of the University library, posing for tourists in his academic regalia, and writing his memoirs – the very work we are now reading ­– in the public toilets next to his former office.  

Bluffworld, therefore, purportedly charts the rise and fall of Tom’s professional and personal life (although copious editorial footnotes that call out unattributed plagiarism and lapses in style and taste questions also question the writer’s veracity). Although of humble, working-class origins, Tom is blessed with a gift of empathy for writing he has never read and an instinctive ability to tailor his writing to suit the needs of individual lecturers. But what really sets him on the path to a successful academic career is the fact that he is aware that he – and everyone else in the Humanities – are full of crap. Thus armed he manages to fake his way through his masters and into a lectureship, gaining tenure by dint of outlasting the old guard. But changes are coming and, as departments are rebranded and downsized to make room for burgeoning administrative structures, Tom recognises the alluring nonsense of management-speak draws from the same font on which he has built his career. And in the final, desperate battle for the survival of the Humanities, he chooses his side, secure in the knowledge that it is bullshit all the way down. 

One of the maxims passed on to aspiring authors is ‘write what you know’, and as an eminent figure in New Zealand’s literary establishment, Patrick Evan’s skewering of traditional and contemporary university structures will be instantly familiar to anybody who has spent time in an academic setting. Tom bluffs his way through lectures using a combination of CliffNotes, overheard tea-room conversations and a passing familiarity with the opening paragraphs of key literary works. The English Department responds to demands to get more ‘bums on seats’ by introducing a barbeque course entitled American Gustation (part of the Cultural misunderstandings paper), and the faculty listens in thrall to the VC’s inspirational vision going forward of a cyber-smart campus plugged into a wired-up world. And then there is the subject of Tom’s non-existent thesis, a fictional writer– albeit based on a highly successful plagiarist – whose absence comes to be internationally recognised as influencing the work of the Fenham group.  

Astute, merciless, and incredibly funny, with appropriately unacknowledged echoes of everything from Decline and Fall and Porterhouse Blue to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Bluffworld is a masterclass in literary dissimulation from a master of the art.