Crump's Terms — Zulfikar Ghose

Set in the swinging London of the 1960s, Crump's Terms evokes that time of the exploding popular culture through the life of its remarkable hero. An English teacher at a London Secondary Modern school, Crump presides over a class of adolescents. In the course of his working day, his narrative is presented as a continuous stream of memories, associations and obsessive literary quotations that cut into the present with cinematic deftness. The nouvelle vague cinema, which was important in the 1960s, the burgeoning popular culture and Pop Art, the whole cultural environment of the time is the background of the novel in which Crump's narrative, often mimicking those styles, is created. Then there is the story of Crump's wife Frieda, a South African at the time of apartheid whose mother has defected to Communist East Germany and the story of her own apparent defection. But are these stories and Crump's apparent memories real or are they projections of scenarios in Crump's mind? Is he, tormented by the present, making up nouvelle vague and literary images to create a distracting fiction for himself? Is his whole life a fictive invention of his mind? Then there are his spontaneous lectures to his students uttered as an incisive commentary about the state of Europe; there is the philosophical underpinning -- what it is all about; and there is Zulfikar Ghose's remarkable prose that is imagistic, witty, and original. This is a novel that produces the Nabokovian authentic vibrancy of sheer literary pleasure. It captures its time, the Sixties, and yet it is timeless.