THE ODIUM TRILOGY charts a complete academic year in the misfortune, decline and fall of a dysfunctional provincial English university. An American Professor arrives at the beginning of term one to take up a research post, but he is not what he seems. He has been hired by the University’s ruthless Vice Chancellor to sort out the many problems he has with his enemies among the staff, but we come to learn that he has a mission of his own. His unorthodox methods cause the University to spin entirely out of control, leading to an explosive climax that will haunt it for the rest of the year. Seven deadly plot twists follow, involving blackmail, homophobia, misogyny, violence, ignorance, corruption and deceit. Amidst a welter of comic characters are Nigel Asterisk, the weasel-like Registrar; Avril Poon, the opportunistic Union president; James Redman, her morally upstanding deputy; Robert McNamara, a disillusioned specialist in Politics; Drusilla Frost, the overripe head of PR; not to speak of a femme fatale postgraduate student, a Professor of Arabic poetry who always wears a white suit, a Ukrainian lecturer with madcap broken English, an educationist who gives a lecture which causes an international diplomatic incident, a Welsh malcontent, and one or two notorious leaders of the western world. Clockman’s hilarious triple-decker epic encapsulates all the features of the twenty-first century academy: sexual intrigue, thirst for revenge, viciousness, erudite stupidity, hypocrisy, selfishness, egomania, greed and iniquity.
