Novel: Doctor Criminale

Overview
Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale is a satirical chase-novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when ideas, reputations, and borders are all in motion. Its elusive quarry is Doctor Bazlo Criminale, a celebrated Central European thinker whose aphorisms and shifting theories have made him a media-age intellectual star. The narrator, Francis Jay, a young London journalist attached to a television arts program, is assigned to secure the definitive interview. What begins as a routine commission becomes a pursuit across the newly reconfigured map of Europe, where pasts are being rewritten and celebrity is manufactured as swiftly as it is dismantled.

Plot
Francis first encounters Criminale through his legend: a philosopher-novelist of ambiguous origins, long exiled from a totalitarian regime, now omnipresent on the conference and festival circuit. Securing him proves impossible. Every lead yields contradictory accounts, mentor, lover, rival, translator, and former party official each supply a different Criminale. Francis follows this cloud of testimony from London studios to university auditoriums, book fairs, embassies, and hotel bars in cities like Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin, places where an old political vocabulary is collapsing and a new cultural marketplace is taking shape.

Along the way, Francis is drawn into Criminale’s unsettled orbit, meeting the scholar-companions who protect and exploit the brand, and the enemies who claim to hold secret-police files implicating him in betrayals from the years of repression. Rumors proliferate: that he was a victim and a hero; that he collaborated; that he collaborated only to subvert; that the files themselves are fictions. Each time Francis closes the distance, at a colloquium, a lecture, a reception, Criminale slips away, leaving behind a fresh riddle or a carefully posed paradox about truth and history.

The pursuit reaches a crest when a cache of documents appears to promise resolution. The dossier, however, proves as unstable as the reputations it seeks to fix. Criminale responds with dazzling evasions, arguing that identity is narrative, archives are texts, and the age requires flexible selves. Francis’s producers demand a singular, televisable revelation; what he has gathered is a tangle of narratives. The interview never coheres. Criminale vanishes again, buoyed by his mystique, while Francis returns to London with footage that captures the chase but not the prize.

Characters
Francis Jay is the earnest, slightly hapless observer, a professional mediator of culture who discovers how much mediation erases. Doctor Bazlo Criminale is the consummate postmodern subject: brilliant, performative, and morally undecidable, a man who has learned to survive shifting regimes by shifting discourse. Around them swirl academics, editors, fixers, and lovers, each with a stake in Criminale’s meaning and market value, each refracting him into a different figure.

Themes
The novel anatomizes the post-1989 scramble to reassign credit and blame, and the way media turns intellectual life into a circuit of appearances. It probes complicity under authoritarianism and the ethics of survival, while mocking the intellectual fashions, structuralisms, postmodernisms, theologies of doubt, that both illuminate and obscure the past. Truth emerges not as a clear line but as a contested commodity, vulnerable to spin, translation, and the seductions of celebrity.

Style and Setting
Bradbury blends campus comedy with travelogue and political farce, moving through lecture halls, transit lounges, and conference hotels where the new Europe is being theorized into existence. The tone is witty and skeptical yet tinged with melancholy, aware that laughter and moral uncertainty often share the same stage. The end leaves Francis and the reader with a paradox: pursuit can reveal more than capture, and in an age built on narratives, the most dangerous fictions are frequently the ones we need most.