Final Demands - Frederic Raphael

This is the final part of a series of three books chronicling the lives of Cambridge graduates from the 1950s to the recent past. Adam Morris first appears in The Glittering Prizes as a young undergraduate who becomes a writer in literary London. Fame and Fortune continues the careers of the group of students through their working lives which culminate in this last series as they reach the beginnings of old age. Frederic Raphael was a brilliant classicist at Charterhouse (an English public school; the English public school?) and began Classics at Cambridge before switching (as you are allowed, even encouraged, to do at Cambridge) to Philosophy. Classics, however, continues to play an important role in his writing and he one of the few writers who include Latin and Greek literature seriously, without condescension, as a major part of European literature. He is one of the most European of writers in English, drawing for his inspiration on a wide range of authors of all languages into which he draws the Classical authors as a matter of course. For the classicist interested in how the subject is portrayed in a modern novel the figure of Adam Morris’s daughter Rachael is the most involving. She is a young classicist who surprisingly goes to California with Bill Bourne, also a classicist and one of Adam’s Cambridge contemporaries. Her work on Catullus is well received, although Adam takes a little of the credit for himself; but he should be ashamed of himself for the muddled line of poem 51 on page 185. It should read identidem te (not et) and the line ends after te. Can he really be quoting the text of a JRS article? Or is FR having an elaborate game with us here? Is Adam supposed to be so well-read that he can misquote Catullus? Not with the text in front of him, surely. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to have a young, female and pretty cool character given Latin literature as her subject in a modern novel.
The reviewers all recognise that Adam is a thinly veiled autobiographical version of Raphael himself: the polished wit, the long-windedness, the Jewishness, the prickliness. He is not always a likeable character, but I guess he is not meant to be. Hearing Tom Conti from the BBC television and radio versions say the words in your head, however, makes him a more real person than just the words off the page.
Reviewers are less forthcoming about the basis for the other characters. So who are they based on? Is Bill Bourne based on John Sullivan who worked on Martial and Petronius, as Bill did? Sullivan did, I think, die relatively young, but did he also run into trouble with the black faculty for alleged racism? Adam gets embroiled in a Black Athena-type argument at Bill’s memorial gathering in Los Angeles. As for the others: is Joyce Hadleigh drawn from Joan Bakewell? Is Alan Parks Clive James? Or could he be David Frost? Is Samuel Marcus Cohen George Steiner? Is there a website devoted to this kind of pointless but intriguing speculation?