Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography. Yet it’s a matter of public record that, in 2014, Mark Lawson resigned from BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row, which he’d presented for 16 years. For the previous two months, an investigation turned disciplinary process at the corporation had pursued accusations of Lawson’s “horrendous” bullying in the workplace. After such a precipitous fall from grace, one can go home and contemplate one’s sins, decide simply to turn the page, or opt to turn a less metaphorical page and write a book. Lawson has gone for the latter, and the sins he contemplates are largely other people’s.
His subject matter – what his protagonist dubs the “Age of Accusation” and our “Culture of Comeuppance” – is meaty and painfully contemporary. For all its warts, The Allegations is a good book, and edited a bit differently it might have been a cracking one.
Set in a fictional University of Middle England (UME), which has instituted the “monetisation of knowledge” and rebranded students “customers”, the novel develops two strands of false accusation. Ned Marriott, a history professor and popular television presenter of historical documentaries à la Simon Schama, is still woozing off his 60th birthday celebrations when he is roused by the police and charged with “historic” sexual assault of a girlfriend, 38 years earlier. (The lead characters are pedants – as, one suspects, is Lawson, as am I, so I can only applaud the fact that the text always frames “historic” in this context with inverted commas. Unless said abuse is unprecedented in scale, transgressions of the distant past are historical.)
After a second woman makes a similar allegation, Ned’s goose looks cooked; he could be labelled a rapist for life. For as Ned registers in due course, murder suspects can be cleared – someone else did it; but with no other witness to a story that participating parties tell differently, a stink can stick to anyone accused of sexual crimes, legal exoneration or no.
Told in parallel, the second strand regards Ned’s best friend and fellow history professor Tom Pimm, whose persecution would more closely resemble the author’s apparently Kafkaesque encounter with the BBC’s new zero tolerance for bullying – whatever that means; as The Allegations implies, a concept imported from the playground to the workplace is intrinsically thorny. A wag and compulsive wit who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, Tom is brought up on trumped-up (can we even use that phrase any more?) charges of bullying and insubordination. Anonymous complainants are awarded the tag “victim” with no “alleged” tacked on, their identity protected by postcode labels like “W1”– even if which colleagues told which tales is obvious to everyone.
A defender of the robust academic jousting of yore, Tom takes on Wuss World. The scenes in which he confronts first the Workplace Harmony committee, then a shilly-shallying administrator during an ineffectual appeals process, are hands down the best in the book, and delightful enough to justify getting through the rest of an arguably bloated text. Lawson has a great ear for jargon, inserting namby-pamby, faux-empathic refrains like “I can see why you would say that”, and he’s a dab hand at capturing the logical illogic of today’s procedurally encumbered witch-hunt. Though one feels for him; there are some sorts of research that one is better off getting through secondary sources.
In particular, The Allegations nails the guilty-until-proven-guilty circularity involved in recognising subjective experience as prosecution-worthy fact. Take the following dialogue: “Do you accept that offence has widely been taken?” presses one of Tom’s interrogators. Tom says that he would have no control over someone else’s taking offence. “The point I am making, Dr Pimm,” the interrogator continues, “is that, if someone felt you were being insensitive, then, to all intents and purposes, you were.”
“I hope you never become a divorce lawyer or a car insurance company,” Tom replies, “as, in either case, it seems unworkable to have a system in which, if someone thinks it’s your fault, then it is.”
Lawson identifies, too, authorities’ dangerous swing from having once dismissed allegations of bullying, harassment and sexual assault to giving unquestioning credence to same –which provides accusers the tempting power of Arthur Miller’s mischievous, histrionic chorus in The Crucible. A UME administrator submits: “[T]he university has instituted, in certain areas, a policy of sympathy towards the victim.” When Tom inserts “alleged victim”, the administrator says: “Well, no, these allegations have been proved.”
“Really? When and how?”
“When we accepted them as true.”
Reservations: in a long swath mid-novel, nothing happens. We have much reflection, but no progress on either case. This is a problem. Moreover, while it’s obnoxious to tell any author how to write his own book, we might at least question the inclusion of plot summaries and analyses of Lawson’s sister literature of false accusation, which is one choice that drags the pace. Not only The Crucible but The Trial, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Disgrace, An Enemy of the People, Oleanna, The Winslow Boy, and The Human Stain are all generously recapitulated and discussed, on the premise that these works constitute Ned’s reading matter during his suspension from the department. Now, taken as a whole, these additions do genuinely contribute to the impact of the novel, but at considerable cost to momentum. Other writers might have reserved these passages for use in a promotional essay in the Guardian Review or New York Review of Books.
That said, The Allegations is still energised by outraged incredulity. We sense that the scenes with UME interrogators are, horribly, closer to realism than parody. Indeed, reality in this area – the finger-pointing and public shaming of an umbrage-happy age – seems already to have got beyond parody. Hypersensitivity has become a weapon. We vainly fancy ourselves above the ugly informing and paranoia of the rightwing McCarthy era, but in the 21st century the left has fashioned a mirror image.
Lawson describes a university hallway thus: “On almost every noticeboard were posters showing bright red telephones and a number to phone to report a colleague for an offence of some kind. The only alternative decoration advocated the banning of various speakers, allegedly pro-Zionist or trans-phobic, from campus.” For “no-platforming”, read “blacklisting”. The hounding of old men for “historic sexual abuse” to no end but the destruction of reputation differs little from the rooting out of communist sympathisers, however saintly the contemporary crusade may seem. Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined “bullying” can themselves constitute a form of bullying. Lawson pushes back against the tyranny of the aggrieved.
Lionel Shriver’s new novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 is published by HarperCollins. The Allegations is published by Picador (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
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