The Noughties by Ben Masters

Masters was 24 when his first novel became the subject of a bidding war between two publishers — something that most Oxford English graduates can only dream of.

Were the publishers hoping to cash in on the success of David Nicholls’s One Day, which became a Hollywood movie? Nicholls told the story of two graduates from Sheffield University in the years following their graduation. Masters’s novel starts in the Kings Arms, Oxford, the night after finals, and his protagonist, English student Eliot, tells most of the story in flashback.

The setting — and the author’s age — makes this irrestistible reading for anyone hoping to discover what life is like for today’s Oxford students, and what they are really thinking about. With his mobile phone vibrating in his pocket, Eliot must make sense of the heady atmosphere and take decisions that will affect the rest of his life.

It makes depressing reading for anyone who hopes that Oxford must have changed since the days of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The ‘lower middle-class’ Eliot is exquisitely aware of his ‘inferior’ background, and the hedonistic upper-class still seem to rule the roost — but perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise in a country ruled by old Etonians.

Being an English graduate, Masters makes a clever post-modern comment about his hero’s tendency to stereotype, but he cannot disguise the fact that supporting characters seem to have been constructed to represent each different type of student.

His depiction of the clever repartee of Eliot’s Holywell College tutorials allows him to introduce countless literary references, but I’ll leave others to decide whether this makes the story more profound. At one point, Eliot is told that his essay shows potential, and I’d say the same about this novel.