Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993 TAG: 9312260111
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A HOVERING OF VULTURES. By Robert Barnard. Charles Scribner's Sons. $20.
Of these two literary murder mysteries, the title of Barnard's might better fit the story in Jones'.
Barnard's human vultures - a group gathered in rural England to pay literary homage (and, also, for some of them, to attain less savory aims) at the restored Bronte-esque homeplace of a brother-and-sister novelist pair dead for 50 years - are guileless innocents compared to the vultures in "Murder at the MLA."
The MLA is the Modern Language Association, a real-life organization of English professors and would-be professors. The book's setting is an annual end-of-the-year MLA convention, in Chicago.
In Jones' world, this particular professoriate teems with pedants, loonies and sharp practitioners of academic politics. Not only do the professor-critics hover over works of literature, tearing meaning from them to fit whatever ideological box they have selected in pursuit of career advancement and peers' adulation. They also - those, anyway, on university search committees - hover like vultures at a meat market over the unemployed or underemployed Ph.D.s seeking tenure-track work in a field where the supply of job applicants greatly exceeds the demand. Both the motive for the murders and the key to their solution arise directly from this context.
Jones sketches the characters vividly and wickedly. Using the names of real universities enhances a subtheme: There is a hierarchy of institutional prestige as well as the heirarchy of faculty rank and tenure.
Verisimilitude is marred, however, by at least one mistake in geography. I don't know whether the University of Virginia English department is, as Jones intimates, a bastion of WASP maleness. I do know that UVa is in the western piedmont of Virginia, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and not in Tidewater, where Jones locates it.
The portrait Jones paints isn't pretty: The Chicago cops come off looking a lot more decent than America's English profs. The author presumably is well-acquainted with the latter. Perhaps it's little wonder, then, that the publisher does not identify Jones, whoever he or she may be, and instead provides a satirical bio.
Barnard is a former lecturer in English at universities in Australia and Norway, and there's nothing secret about his identity. He's a prize-winning mystery writer; "Hovering" is the latest of his more than two-dozen suspense novels.
Its plot, too, draws on the materialistic aspects of literature, though it has to do with the business side of publishing rather than career advancement in the academy. Also like "MLA," "Hovering" is a fun-poking book, the fun being poked mainly at the camp followers of late and heretofore largely unlamented writers whose work, truth to tell, isn't always readable, let alone very good.
But against the dark humor of "MLA," Barnard is refreshingly lighthearted. Even the murderous villain, and the villainous murdered, have their relatively pleasant sides.
More conventional and less memorable, "Hovering" is nonetheless the one to choose if you're looking for sunny escape; "MLA" if you're hungrier for meatier fare.
Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.
by CNB