Floating Down to Camelot
 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." Another central character, Helen, an undergraduate reading English literature, lacks stability in her life and finds her main solace in poetry and particularly in the romantic medieval work of Tennyson. Her obsession with The Lady of Shalott, and her identification with the lady of the poem, bring her to a fatal ending. Helen has been seduced by the medieval romances of the Victorian 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, of Auden and Betjeman and Brian Patten." By buying a Donald Duck mask for bank robbing purposes, Bill unwittingly identifies himself with the rapist. In the course of a week during the University's Michaelmas term, the tensions and interplay between the leading characters lead not only to bank robbery, but also to ritual castration, transvestism, and a fatal car crash. "From the Whipple Museum to the University Arms Hotel, intellectuals and tourists turned pale. What could have caused it, this catastrophic sound?" The novel includes many quotations, not only from Tennyson but also from Thomas Hood, William Thackeray, and W. H. Auden.