India, Sept. 23 -- Academia has been the subject and the backdrop of many a satirical literary work. Two novels on this year's Booker longlist, Black Bag by Luke Kennard and The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams, return to the genre of the campus novel. While Kennard's satirical take is a commentary on the ongoing technocratic capitalist nightmare that we inhabit, Williams's gothic campus love story uses a more surrealistic approach. The Vivisectors is set in an unnamed city with a prominent ancient university (it could be Oxford or Cambridge but the reader never knows for sure) where the academics are at war with the gardeners who are very powerful as the city has been entirely overtaken by foliage.

The novel's narrator-protagonist Agath...