Lords of Serendipity by Randy Boyagoda review – a campus satire for this moment of crisis

This propulsive, globe-trotting tale brilliantly skewers the corruption and corporatisation of higher education It’s no secret that academia is on the blink; Canadian author Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, which is equal parts satire, dystopia and exposé, tells the story of all that’

This propulsive, globe-trotting tale brilliantly skewers the corruption and corporatisation of higher education It’s no secret that academia is on the blink; Canadian author Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, which is equal parts satire, dystopia and exposé, tells the story of all that’s wrong, glitchy and broken. Set across Sri Lanka, the United States and Italy, it centres on a cast of students, parents and professors, and their dealings with a common antagonist: the university. The first character we meet is Sri Lankan teen Devi, who is set on obtaining offers from “Ochpys” – her acronym for Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford.

To help her realise her dream, Devi’s family of modest means – her mother, father, maternal grandmother and two brothers – hire themselves out as mourners at the funerals of the wealthy. Most of this money goes towards paying Johannes, her tutor on WhatsApp who, unbeknown to Devi, is a hard-up Indian student at Arcadia Tech, an undistinguished university in the US. Meanwhile, Jack, a statistician at the same institution, has taken on an additional teaching load to meet the fees of the elite college his daughter Katrina attends in New England.

Soon he catches on to a grade-fixing scheme aimed at flailing international students, run by his teaching assistant Allard Hamburger. Jack is left in disbelief when, to buy his silence, the university puts him on paid administrative leave instead of launching an inquiry into a scandal that has left one student dead by suicide. Continue reading...