james hynes's the lecturer's tale:

at first, i was horrified, thinking oh no a nasty campus tragedy filled with disillusioned academics? this is not what young aspiring grad students want to hear about! and then after about 30 demoralising pages the magic finger popped up and i thought, aha, roald dahl crossed with faust, is it? good! and i did enjoyed the first two-thirds of the book, though i loathed the last third of it. i don't know about the reviewers calling it a dark satire. dark? if the characters weren't such caricatures - their names especially irritated me from page one - and if the ending hadn't been such a rotten over-the-top cop-out ending - but it wasn't, on the whole, bad at all. and now i think i shall turn to a.s. byatt's angels and insects. .