The novel opens in present-day Sydney, where Plant haphazardly plies his trade. Out of the blue, his services are retained by a celebrated academic visiting from Oxford, the slippery Archer Major (as with other Wilding novels, character names savour less of mimesis than of leg-pulling). Since his arrival in Sydney, Major has been receiving anonymous letters threatening to expose him for some unspecified skulduggery. Several decades previous, he had taught at the city’s grandest university (unnamed in the text, its identity will be obvious to most readers) before becoming an international expert on the occult. Plant speculates that the poison pen might belong to one of the smooth-talking scholar’s many ex-girlfriends, but the client himself suspects something more Machiavellian – an academic rival trying to spoil his chances of gaining a prestigious Oxford chair. The insufferable Major has no shortage of enemies.

One possible culprit is Paul Revill, a local academic now on the verge of retirement, who has despised Major since their undergraduate days at Oxford. This slow-burning animosity would seem motive enough to write a threatening letter or two, but Revill is suspicious for reasons other than professional jealousy – by his own admission, he is an unreconstructed radical leftie. In Revill’s somewhat paranoid opinion, Major has prospered by working for various secret service agencies, allegedly using sorcery to persecute dissidents and other assumed enemies of the state. In a bizarre moment of self-justification, Revill even explains his own dead-end career as the result of Major’s black magic.

Plant’s enquiries uncover little, though they sound like fun – long lunches with superannuated dons and long talks with sexy hippies. Major eventually returns to England, but the hate mail keeps coming. Plant is summoned to continue his investigation in Oxford, where he soon learns that Revill is also in town. Naturally, Revill denies sending the letters, claiming that he is merely enjoying one last sabbatical before the academic gravy train reaches its final destination. Matters become considerably more complicated when the prime suspect is found dead after dining at High Table, with Plant left wondering if this might be Major’s sinister handiwork.

The Magic of It is the third in Wilding’s series of Plant novels. There is certainly no drop-off in satirical energy here, though this time the principal targets are all university-based. As an emeritus professor, the author knows academia inside out, and, for good reason, his campus novels have been favourably compared with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. There is, for instance, a similar use of extravagant metaphors – Major’s unsettling grin is likened to the grille of ‘a Japanese staff car circa 1938’, while the toast crumbs and eggshell fragments on Revill’s breakfast table are said to resemble ‘the debris of a NATO human rights mission’. As these examples suggest, Wilding’s comedy often has a decidedly political tinge. Indeed, Revill might well be speaking for the author when he bemoans ‘the great degradation of the times’, by which he seems to mean the triumph of greed, the loss of idealism, and the general dumbing-down of everything.

In some respects, The Magic of It might be the perfect novel for any disenchanted humanities academic to take on the flight to the next overseas conference. The dialogue moves at a cracking pace, with plenty of brainy allusions to entertain along the way (my own favourite is the description of music by Percy Grainger as having a ‘flagellant beat’). On the other hand, the satire often cuts close to the bone. Over gnocchi and a bottle of Vernaccia, Revill and his mates lament the venality of modern academic life, but their saturnine musings stick in Plant’s craw. ‘At least they had their day,’ the tertiary-educated detective rightly reflects; in his own case, he had ‘slipped straight from graduation to superfluity’ with no career at all and thus no pension ‘like these comfortable old buffers’. Australian academics, Plant recognises, are always at their most eloquent when whinging about their lot.

It is for this reason that The Magic of It, though undoubtedly a pleasure to read, is somewhat dispiriting to contemplate. Satire usually has a serious purpose, and here Wilding’s vision of the modern university is a relentlessly pessimistic one. At their boozy lunch, Plant’s former postgraduate supervisor points out that their old department has recently been reorganised and is now officially called the ‘School of History, English, Languages, Literature’; the Dantean overtones of the inevitable acronym are not lost on the characters. It is a feeling that would be shared by many of the novel’s readers who have either studied or taught in a university humanities department – the feeling of having woken in a dark wood, the right way lost.