I am often asked what it is actually like studying at Oxford. I am sure it is a question we have all been asked and after the awkward cough and shuffle that accompanies any admission of our Alma Mater, my next step is always a brief exposition of the college system (that is both incomplete and inaccurate), a poor joke about drunkenly stumbling on cobbles before feebly trailing out with the old lie, “It’s just like any other university really…”
It is rare, then, to find fiction that encapsulates the contemporary Oxford experience – Brideshead Revisited may still be a handbook for students of Christ Church and Magdalen, but I am willing to bet it is about as far from most of our lives as Trainspotting. The Last Enchantments manages to fill this gap for modern Oxford, and do it spectacularly, grippingly, and with heart-wrenching pathos. There are gems of Ox- ford life within Charles Finch’s first foray into non-crime fiction: the frequent trips to Purple Turtle, the permanent backdrop of intellectual struggle and a cameo for Hassan’s kebab van, which struck me with particular fondness.
Beyond the excitement that comes from reading about places that also form the backdrop to one’s own life, Finch captures themes that should resonate with Oxford students, and then reflects on them with a maturity, eloquence and sparkling humour that is both uncommon and addictive. In particular, the daily littleness of life amongst the dreaming spires, the feeling of unreality that occurs both when reflecting on home life from Oxford and thinking of Oxford from home, and the frequent meaningless romances that emerge from college life are expounded in light, beautiful prose, profound and yet not pretentious.
But more than being about Oxford, The Last Enchantments is a novel about youth and its loss, love and life. The protagonist, Will Baker (whom one suspects is an image of Mr Finch himself) is an American graduate student, standing on the threshold of adulthood and placed before decisions that will profoundly shape his life. The choices are ones that are familiar and yet intensely moving: his long term and dependable partner Alison, left at home in the States, is placed in contrast to his British love, the enigmatic Sophie; the lucrative career in the City, the passion and excitement of the campaign trail and the ethereal promise of an academic grant. All pull Baker in different directions that cross oceans. Most of all, the novel presents the foreboding sense that – in one’s early 20s – one’s decisions begin to have serious and long term ramifications.
Oxford is the perfect setting for this regretful abandonment of youth. One line in particular resonates, when the University is given its epitaph: “so much of being at Oxford is the stretch of days behind and before you, the feeling of shelter inside that great mammoth body, the security of it”. The sense of contemplative melancholy is at the end overpoweringly sad, and a fitting end to a novel that not only perfectly encapsulates being a student of Ox- ford, but also beautifully expresses the feeling of no longer being young.
