Floating Down to Camelot is acampus novel byDavid Benedictus published in 1985 and set inCambridge.
The title is drawn fromTennyson's poemThe Lady of Shalott, in which while floating down toCamelot the Lady of Shalott apparently dies of a broken heart, caused by the rejection ofSir Lancelot.
Benedictus began to write the novel while he was a fellow commoner atChurchill College, Cambridge, and a Judith E. Wilson visitingFellow in theUniversity.[1]
When Bill, an impoverished Cambridge student, is even unable to pay for his mother's funeral, his thoughts turn to crime. However, a friend warns him that "To have no money is to join the aristocracy, Bill. When the day comes for you to have it, you will have left the aristocracy, never to return."[5] Another central character, Helen, an undergraduate readingEnglish literature, lacks stability in her life and finds her main solace inpoetry and particularly in theromantic medieval work of Tennyson. Her obsession withThe Lady of Shalott, and her identification with the lady of the poem, bring her to a fatal ending.[6] Helen has been seduced by the medieval romances of theVictorian era but does not wish to be seduced by Bill. Lance, a scientist, hopes to save the world, but the effect of his experiments on Helen is less positive. Meanwhile,the Cambridge rapist is at large. "This is the world of bedsitter girls, ofAuden andBetjeman andBrian Patten."[7] By buying aDonald Duck mask forbank robbing purposes, Bill unwittingly identifies himself with the rapist.[8]
In the course of a week during theUniversity'sMichaelmas term, the tensions and interplay between the leading characters lead not only to bank robbery, but also to ritualcastration,transvestism, and a fatal car crash. "From theWhipple Museum to the University Arms Hotel, intellectuals and tourists turned pale. What could have caused it, this catastrophic sound?"[9]
The novel includes many quotations, not only from Tennyson but also fromThomas Hood,William Thackeray, and W. H. Auden.[6]
According to one critic, "Floating Down to Camelot is a merciless novel about the loss of landmarks and the state of disorder in the contemporary English society. All the traditional sources of stability... are here ruthlessly debunked."[6]
Another analysis suggests that "the narrator of David Benedictus'sFloating Down to Camelot epitomizes the ludic quest... But the emphasis is so ostentatiously on the comic process rather than on the derided target that the ludic seems to eradicate thesatiric.[10]
The book is considered of enough significance to be listed in Graham Chainey'sA Literary History of Cambridge.[11] Perhaps surprisingly, theAmerican Jewish Year Book for 1987 considered it to be a "new fictional work of Jewish interest".[12]