An Academic Question – Barbara Pym (1986)

Written mainly in the early 1970’s An Academic Question was put together posthumously by Barbara Pym’s biographer and friend Hazel Holt. Maybe because of the way it was essentially compiled – by someone else – from Barbara Pym’s drafts and notes the novel has a very different feel to it. The novel has a light, bright freshness to it and I actually enjoyed it a lot – but it is possibly the least Pymish of her novels. Certainly this novel is more rooted in academia than the Anglican Church, where so many others books are rooted, set among the various inhabitants of a small unnamed University town (although I felt it must be Bath).

“Just as our green Triumph Herald was no longer quite big enough, so the position of lecturer did not give him all the scope he needed. He knew that he was looked on as able and promising, but he was like a card in a game of patience, his moves blocked by cards of higher suit. The one most in his way was Crispin Maynard and, although Alan could not, of course, hope to get his chair when he retired, he felt that once Crispin had gone, his own upward path to progress would be easier. My mother, much addicted to patience (Alan’s mother never had time), would so often wail in a despairing tone, ‘But I can’t get the two – there’s a Black king in the way!”, which exactly expressed Alan’s feelings.”

Caro Grimstone a sometimes bored faculty wife married to the dull slightly ambitious Alan becomes an unwitting accomplice in her husband’s machinations, when she volunteers to read to an elderly man in a care home. The Reverend Stillingfleet has a manuscript – well known about in academic circles – hidden in a box in his room at the nursing home, he has so far not allowed anyone to see it. As the Stillingfleet papers concern the very subject that ethno-historian Alan Grimstone is interested – he takes the opportunity to accompany Caro on one of her visits so he can help himself to the manuscript. Alan intends to use Stillingfleet‘s work in a paper he himself is writing. Alan is tremendously excited about the paper and what it might mean for him. Caro is instantly a little uneasy about her complicity in Alan’s theft – and later takes a part time library job in order to secrete the manuscript away with other Stillingfleet papers. The data that Alan has access to gives him a huge advantage over his academic rivals and in the run up to his paper’s publication Alan finds he has to defend his position as his rivals start to suspect the origin of his information.

“Dolly had remained single, though she had always given me to understand that her life had not been without love. But now, in her sixties, she had grown away from human beings and only kept in touch with her former lovers for practical and material advantages; she was more moved by the sight of a hedgehog’s little leg raised to scratch itself than by any memory of a past love. These same hedgehogs were one of the reasons Dolly never went away. The habit of staying at home had its origin, she told me in a quarrel with a neighbour who had refused to put food out for the hedgehogs during Dolly’s absence.”

An Academic Question is set in a more modern world than many of her earlier novels. The world in which these characters exist feels more real, and although definitely less Pymish there are still examples of Pym’s wit, the absurdities of life which Barbara Pym always highlights so beautifully. The meshing of the modern world and the Pymish world is slightly uneasy to some Pym fans perhaps, there is an extra marital affaire; talk of abortion alongside the petty jealousies of academics, an elderly woman who keeps hedgehogs and the endless question of what to wear to dinner parties. I always love Pym’s characters – and in An Academic Question there several characters of a Pymish bent to enjoy – including the wonderful Sister Dew – who we first meet in An Unsuitable Attachment, and Dolly – the keeper of hedgehogs, and Caro’s friend Coco and his mother kitty (Dolly’s sister), constantly reminiscing about their days on “the island” – in the Caribbean from where they originally come. An Academic Question is an enjoyable novel, the difference in tone – it feels lighter as well as more modern – surely makes it interesting enough to Pym fans – however it is an enjoyable novel too. I really liked the gentle ending of this novel, the feeling of things carrying on –in a seasonal kind of way – not unlike an academic year I suppose.