Novel: Cuts

Overview
Malcolm Bradbury’s Cuts (1987), subtitled “A Very Short Novel,” is a brisk, satiric portrait of Britain in the Thatcher era, where public austerity and private media boom collide. It follows a mid-career novelist who becomes both writer-in-residence at a fledgling university and a would-be television dramatist. As institutional budgets shrink and broadcasting fashions shift, promises are steadily reduced, ambitions trimmed, and narratives literally shortened. The book’s title names the policy reality shaping the characters’ lives and the editorial fate of the story itself, turning a campus and media comedy into a sharp fable about how cultural value is measured, marketed, and pared down.

Plot
The narrator, a modestly successful novelist, accepts a year-long residency at a new university in the English Midlands that is eager for prestige but vulnerable to government retrenchment. He arrives to a world of rebranding, mission statements, and perpetual committees, where departments protect their turf and the humanities can justify themselves only in terms of “deliverables.” Creative writing is pitched as communications training, literature as transferable skills, and administrators promise excellence while trimming staff, teaching hours, and basic amenities. The narrator gamely leads seminars, mentors aspiring writers, and tries to carve out time for his own book amid a cascade of memos and reviews.

At the same time, a television company courts him to develop a grand, many-part serial rooted in English social history. Initial conversations are lavish: multiple episodes, an ensemble cast, serious budgets, prestige slots. Each subsequent meeting brings a revision downward. The thirteen-part saga becomes a six-parter, then a two-parter, then a single film. Executives talk about changing audience tastes, scheduling realities, and the need to make content “cut-through.” Notes arrive that simplify characters, streamline settings, and request more speed, action, and uplift. What began as a layered drama is pared to outline, then to a treatment, then to something like a pitch document.

Back on campus, the residency is threatened by mid-year budget reviews. A colleague is nudged into redundancy, students lose tutorials, the library trims hours, and the winter heating goes erratic. The narrator’s personal attachments, tentative friendship, a potential romance, fleeting solidarity with colleagues, struggle under time pressures and institutional anxiety. When the university undergoes a restructuring, his post is redefined, then reconsidered. The creative work he’s meant to inspire is displaced by managerial rhetoric about targets and efficiencies.

The television project, meanwhile, nears production only to be reshaped by a new commissioning round. A different executive arrives, tastes shift again, and the “bankable” version bears little resemblance to the original idea. Eventually even the single film becomes a pilot, then a trailer, then a promotional clip that might lead to a series if audience research responds. The novel’s narrative quickens and contracts to match these developments, culminating in an abrupt, mordantly comic ending that enacts the very logic the book diagnoses.

Themes
Cuts explores the commodification of culture, showing how universities and broadcasters alike recode artistic ambition into managerial metrics. It treats language itself as a casualty, saturated with euphemism and corporate cliché that mask loss as innovation. The book also studies time, sliced into meetings, deadlines, and deliverables, and the way scarcity erodes collegiality, mentorship, and the slow work of literature. The media subplot exposes how taste is manufactured and how development processes iron complexity into marketable simplicity.

Style and structure
Written with Bradbury’s dry wit and precise social observation, the novella is compact and deliberately self-reflexive. Its brevity is not just design but argument: form mirrors content as the story is progressively abbreviated by the same forces that reshape its characters’ work. Scenes shift briskly between campus corridors and glass-walled television offices, their parallel vocabularies of spin and austerity undercut by the narrator’s rueful intelligence. The result is a campus-and-media satire that doubles as a formal demonstration of what happens when everything, including narrative, is optimized, rationalized, and cut.