Floating Down to Camelot

• Bill, a Cambridge undergraduate, believes in free will, but suffers from extreme poverty.
• Helen, an impressionable Cambridge student of English literature.
• Lance, an American reading Natural Sciences.
• John, a Cambridge don who teaches determinism but who suffers from randomness in his own life.
• Gillian, John's wife, who sees signs of divine intervention even in the game of Scrabble.Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 96
• Olaf, who always wears beige - "wool or tweed or synthetics, but always beige".Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 93
• Buzz, also known as 'The Duck'.Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 218

When Bill, an impoverished Cambridge student, is even unable to pay for his mother's funeral, his thoughts turn to crime. However, a friend warns him that "To have no money is to join the aristocracy, Bill. When the day comes for you to have it, you will have left the aristocracy, never to return."David Benedictus, Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 45 Another central character, Helen, an undergraduate reading English literature, lacks stability in her life and finds her main solace in poetry and particularly in the romantic medieval work of Tennyson. Her obsession with The Lady of Shalott, and her identification with the lady of the poem, bring her to a fatal ending.Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic postmodernism: the Victorian tradition and the contemporary British novel (Rodopi, 2001, {{ISBN|90-420-1297-8}}), [https://books.google.com/books?id=clUkEaWgUicC&pg=PA23 pp. 21-22] online Helen has been seduced by the medieval romances of the Victorian era but does not wish to be seduced by Bill. Lance, a scientist, hopes to save the world, but the effect of his experiments on Helen is less positive. Meanwhile, the Cambridge rapist is at large. "This is the world of bedsitter girls, of Auden and Betjeman and Brian Patten."Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 85 By buying a Donald Duck mask for bank robbing purposes, Bill unwittingly identifies himself with the rapist.Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 152

In the course of a week during the University's Michaelmas term, the tensions and interplay between the leading characters lead not only to bank robbery, but also to ritual castration, transvestism, and a fatal car crash. "From the Whipple Museum to the University Arms Hotel, intellectuals and tourists turned pale. What could have caused it, this catastrophic sound?"Floating Down to Camelot (1985), p. 170

The novel includes many quotations, not only from Tennyson but also from Thomas Hood, William Thackeray, and W. H. Auden.

According to one critic, "Floating Down to Camelot is a merciless novel about the loss of landmarks

and the state of disorder in the contemporary English society. All the traditional sources of stability... are here ruthlessly debunked."

Another analysis suggests that "the narrator of David Benedictus's Floating Down to Camelot epitomizes the ludic quest... But the emphasis is so ostentatiously on the comic process rather than on the derided target that the ludic seems to eradicate the satiric.Brian A. Connery, Kirk Combe, Theorizing satire: essays in literary criticism (1995), [https://books.google.com/books?id=VvObMS6AtwgC&pg=PA144 pp. 144-145] online

The book is considered of enough significance to be listed in Graham Chainey's A Literary History of Cambridge.Graham Chainey, A Literary History of Cambridge (1995), p. 313 Perhaps surprisingly, the American Jewish Year Book for 1987 considered it to be a "new fictional work of Jewish interest".David Singer, Ruth R. Seldin, American Jewish Year Book, 1987, p. 216

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Category:1985 British novels

Category:English novels

Category:Novels set in the University of Cambridge

Category:Novels by David Benedictus