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Doctor Criminale
by Malcolm Bradbury

This is a comic novel about philosophy in Europe today, or shall we say ten years ago?

You may ask, how is this possible, to have a comic novel about Philosophy. And it would be a good question, with perhaps only one definitive answer: this book.

Written as an entertaining and evocative travelogue of the places Frances Jay must visit (London, Budapest, Lake Como, Geneva, Brussels, Buenos Aires and of course Paris) in search of the famous philosophe and 20th-century intellect Bazlo Criminale.

Well, actually it's written as a mystery and a love story, but the travel writing is great. And of course it's serious, too. After all, no book about love, life, and philosophy can be funny all the way through, especially when a great deal of money is involved. And so many wives.

Moreover, this book is an excellent companion piece to Bradbury's earlier and much funnier Rates of Exchange, surely one of the funniest books ever written about teaching English as a second language, or life behind the Iron Curtain, or both combined. When I read Rates of Exchange out loud to my wife, she laughed hysterically and then fell asleep. With Doctor Criminale she just laughed and shook her head admiringly. "That Malcolm Bradbury."

Jay has been assigned to create a one-hour television documentary on this great thinker, author and photographer, but virtually no information exists on his private life, aside from a biography in German perhaps written by the Austrian professor Otto Codicil.

Perhaps not.

It's so difficult to make such an assessment on the first reading, a task made more difficult by the fact that Jay's knowledge of German is limited to philosophical terms.

With the assistance of his television producer, who remains behind in Vienna enjoying the high life and spending his small budget, and helped also by the beautiful blonde publisher Ildiko Hazy who he meets in Budapest, Francis Jay is finally able to uncover most if not all of Criminale's mysteries, but not, thank God, ever to begin filming.

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reviewed February 27, 2000