In the Book of Judges, the people of Gilead identify their Ephraimite enemies on the banks of the Jordan by demanding they say ‘shibboleth’, the Hebrew word for ‘stream’. If the captive says ‘sibboleth’ (the outsider’s pronunciation), they are killed. In Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s debut novel Shibboleth, we follow Edward, an outsider incredulous to have ‘escaped’ his state school, as he navigates life at Oxford’s ‘least remarkable’ college. It is the era of identity politics. Students Angelica Mountbatten-Jones and Liberty Vanderbilt-Jackson lead anti-racism workshops, campaign to have a colonialist’s statue removed and apply for internships at firms with names like Sullivan Mengele Wright. When Edward, who passes as white, publicly acknowledges that he is of Zanzibari descent, he is welcomed into the fold and begins an affair with Angelica. He then falls for Rachel, a Jewish student from Germany, much to the disapproval of the others. 

Shibboleth is foremost a comedy and Lambert has an ear for parody. There are books and papers with titles like Anus Mirabilis: The Spirit of Freud in the Letters of San Juan de la Cruz and ‘Please Sir, Can I Have Some More: The Bulimic Challenge to Capitalism in Early Dickens’. The funniest set piece centres on a ‘radicals only’ poetry night. One nerd reads an epic sex poem titled ‘The Chlamidyad’, while another gets thirty-nine cantos into a work-in-progress, ‘Love Beneath the Tractor’, before they are mercifully stopped.

Lambert has taken the phrase ‘Love Beneath the Tractor’ from a remark Martin Amis made in a 2001 interview. While Shibboleth does offer various Amisian distortions and a certain familiar verbosity, the book lacks any real moral point. Yes, woke students are silly, but you knew that already. The novel