Novelist Justin Cartwright arrived at Trinity College, Oxford in 1965 to read PPE, but was permitted to switch to a graduate degree (a BLitt) in Politics. A well-to-do South African, he cut a colonial dash in his ‘bullet-proof’ tweed suit and pink polo-neck.
Though part of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Writer and the City’ series, ‘This Secret Garden’ (subtitle: ‘Oxford Revisited’) is interested in gown rather than town. Fair enough; but college life is tricky to reminisce about without sounding like Uncle Monty. Cartwright permits himself descriptions of quads ‘glowing moistly in a low October sun after a night rain’, then brings himself up short: ‘How easily I slip into this self-congratulatory, clubby mode.’
Actually, ‘This Secret Garden’ is a convivial and always entertaining spidergram of personal associations which raises important questions about tradition and the value of knowledge. Cartwright offsets the ’60s reminiscence with memories of more recent visits to the city, as well as musings on architecture, the Oxford Movement, the arcane workings of the Bodleian Library, the tutorial system, the ‘Brideshead’ myth and his hero, the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Ah yes – Berlin. Cartwright’s most recent novel, last year’s ‘The Song Before it is Sung’, dramatised the relationship between Berlin and Adam von Trott, the Oxford-educated lawyer and diplomat who was executed by the Nazis for his role in Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Hitler. Berlin is crucial to Cartwright’s conception of Oxford, but there’s too much of him here, and it sometimes feels as if the novelist is merely interpolating research material as filler.
Walking around Oxford, Cartwright realises he is jealous of the young, whose lives, he decides, are ‘punctuated by ecstasy’. But are they? It’s worth remembering that many students dislike Oxford intensely – not just the oppressive workload and damp climate, but the nauseating aura of entitlement emanated by the wealthier students who pour in from Eton and Westminster and coerce their way into its institutions through sheer force of confidence. Cartwright believes that Oxford ‘stands for something deep in the Anglo-Saxon mind – excellence, a kind of privilege, a charmed life, deep-veined liberalism, a respect for tradition’. A greater sense that these concepts are not happily synthesized but locked in mutual conflict would have given this book more bite.
