‘I was telling a young guy at the conference just this morning. The day of the single, static campus is over.’
‘And the single, static campus novel with it, I suppose?’
‘Exactly! Even two campuses wouldn’t be enough. Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.’
(Small World, page 63)
This is a long, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly funny novel. It is a sequel ‘of sorts’ to Lodge’s best-selling 1975 hit, Changing Places, in that it includes the two central figures of that novel (the high-flying American academic Morris Zapp and the put-upon dowdy English academic Philip Swallow), but significantly expands the scope to include scores more characters. And it is a long, dense text, half as long again as Changing Places, some 340 pages in the densely-worded Penguin edition. Rich and complex and very funny.
Based on romance
It was a stroke of genius to see that the peripatetic, jet-setting lifestyle of the modern globe-trotting academic and the networks of international colleagues who he or she is continually bumping into at conferences around the world, resembles the tangled interlinking plot structures of late medieval and Renaissance romances, and that an entire novel could be written in which themes and motifs and names and incidents borrowed from that old genre could be recycled to provide the structure, characters and incidents of a 20th-century novel.
The romance genre
Romances flourished as a genre in the high Middle Ages and early Renaissance (1400 to 1600). They differed from epic or tragedy by their focus on love (rather than war and death), generally between one handsome knight and his lady, and detailed the setbacks and difficulties they encounter before finally being united; although other romances also described quests in search of wisdom or some other object – most famously, the Holy Grail. The hundreds of poems written about the knights of King Arthur come under this heading. One of the longest is the Italian Orlando Furioso (1530), which I haven’t read, and the classic late example is Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 to 1600), which I have.
The latter is over 1,000 pages long and that’s in its unfinished state. It tells the increasingly complicated stories of a confusing host of knights and their helpers, the damsels they rescue, fall in love with and lose to sorcerers or dragons, and the allegorical places they visit – the Bower of Bliss, the Garden of Adonis etc.
Lodge deploys his academic knowledge of the genre to create a text which pays homage at every level to the conventions of romance (The Faerie Queene is name-checked several times, just to make it obvious). As Cheryl Summerbee, the airport check-in girl, (unexpectedly) explains:
‘Real romance is a pre-novelistic kind of narrative. It’s full of adventure and coincidences and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that.’ (p.258)
The text also refers to post-Renaissance works which reference or rework romance, from Keats’s ‘Romantic’ poetry, through to T.S. Eliot, whose Modernist masterwork The Waste Land is also quoted throughout. (There is even an amusing scene where the jet-lagged hero arrives in Lausanne only to find everybody dressed as characters from The Waste Land walking round quoting lines from it. It turns out to be the annual Waste Land festival.)
Romance themes
There are so many characters – at some points a bombardment of characters – and we are so often introduced to them for only half a page before being whisked off to meet others, only returning to the first ones 30 or 40 pages later – and so many incidents, scattered and comic, that only make sense when we return to them after a break and begin to piece them together, and which develop and unfold at distant intervals throughout the book – that the book is more like a soap opera with twenty or more strands all moving forward simultaneously in brief cameos (which is exactly the structure of something like The Fairie Queene).
Given all this, it’s easier to approach the book by looking at the themes it incorporates and some of the characters and events which bring them to life, rather than at the ‘story’. For there is no one story: there is a complex web of storyettes. Storylings. Stortions.
Quest
The fundamental theme of romance is the Quest and the core strand in the novel is the quest of young Irish academic Persse McGarrigle (his name reminiscent of the Arthurian Sir Percival) – ignorant of literary theory, the academic racket and still a virgin – for the ravishingly beautiful and dazzlingly intelligent Angelica, who he pursues from conference to conference around the world. Except that she – in a standard but very funny comedy convention – has always just left for the next conference, and so his quest never ends.
Confused identities
It is a running joke that, although Persse (thinks he) is passionately in love with the intelligent, enchanting Angelica, she has a twin sister, Lily, who is a stripper. The outraged Persse glimpses Angelica in a porn movie and then at a strip club, both sightings only spurring him on to ‘save’ this poor damsel. At the climax of the novel Persse excitedly loses his virginity to Lily under the impression she is Angelica. Until she reveals she is Lily, whereupon he is distraught. But she then confuses him (and the reader) by saying she’s really Angelica pulling his leg. At which he is deliriously happy. But then confirms she is in fact Lily. All this is designed to show him he is pursuing a ‘dream’, an idealised version of a woman.
In another strand, the homely old spinster, Miss Sibyl Maiden, reveals that she is in fact the long-lost mother of both the girls, who she was forced to abandon 27 years earlier and hasn’t seen since, and in the final scenes of the novel, she is reunited with the ageing academic who (typically) seduced her all those years ago.
Character
Romances are often populated by types and allegorical figures. It is part of the pleasure of reading them to see a skillful author orchestrate meetings between ‘characters’ which are also encounters between ‘Chastity’ and ‘Temptation’, or ‘Greed’ and ‘Temperance.’
All the characters in Small World have the same level of ‘realism’ as in other Lodge novels, but they are also quite plainly romance types: Persse is a knight errant, Angelica is his Dark Lady, Miss Maiden is the wise woman who, in one striking scene set at Delphi in Greece, parks herself over a cleft in the rock and has a dizzy spell, accurately predicting the end of the plot – because for that moment she is re-enacting the role of the prophetess or sibyl at Delphi who sat in a chair astride a cleft from which holy gases emerged and prophesied the future. There is the ferociously competitive and beautiful and sexually manipulative female Italian academic, Fulvia Morgana, whose name recalls Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian legends. This wonderfully decadent creation not only lures Morris Zapp back to her apartment for what (he is surprised to discover) is meant to be a threesome, but is also an insouciant Marxist critic, relentlessly unmasking the bourgeois assumptions of literature and criticism alike, while herself enjoying a high-powered jetsetting lifestyle, luxury apartment and fast cars. So, sexually and morally corrupt.
There is a brilliantly funny strand involving Cheryl Summerbee, the check-in girl at Heathrow, who therefore interacts with almost all the characters at some stage. We learn that she brightens up her day by seating people according to how they treat her. Nice polite people get the seats with long leg-room near the exits. Anyone who’s rude gets sat next to the toilets or a mother with two screaming children. We only have to meet her a couple of times before she can be referred to obliquely by characters at parties saying things like, ‘God I had an awful flight; first I got into a row with some chit of a girl at the check-in and then spent 8 hours sitting next to a mother with a screaming baby.’ It gets funnier each time it happens.
In fact, Cheryl also plays the role of guide or helper when she directs Persse to Heathrow’s little-visited underground chapel, and – unexpectedly – actually pulls out a copy of The Faerie Queene when Persse needs to consult one (to discover the meaning of a cryptic reference Angelica has left for him).
Verbally
At a simple verbal level Lodge has his characters casually use the language of the romance: they are said to be ‘lured’ into situations, to experience ‘peril’, think of each other as a ‘sorceress’ or a ‘hero’, to cast a ‘spell’ on each other. In these tiny verbal details Lodge very enjoyably brings out his theme – but also demonstrates how much contemporary diction is in fact based on this forgotten world.
Incidents
Incidents large and small also bear out the theme. I particularly liked the moment when Hilary, the long-suffering wife of weedy Philip Swallow, one of the two protagonists of Changing Places, waves him off as he leaves in an early morning taxi – having stuffed a bundle of pants and socks just out of the tumble dryer into his lap – and finding herself left with an odd sock waves it at the departing husband ‘like a makeshift favour’ (p.168), like the handkerchief or scarf which a fair lady waved at her knight in a joust.
Locations
The novel flits around the world following the frantic globe-trotting of its characters, with scenes placed in realistic settings in New York, London, Ireland, Hawaii, Heidelberg, Israel, Australia and so on, in hotel rooms, conference rooms, pubs and bars and cinemas and streets. But some of the locations take on an obvious symbolic meaning, like the underground Chapel at Heathrow (reincarnation of the countless chapels which Arthurian knights seek rest in). And there is rather a lot of hanging round in brothels or strip clubs or porn movie cinemas, which are both ‘realistic’ settings for characters sneaking off for a quiet afternoon to bump into other characters with embarrassing consequences, and more symbolic places of temptation and misunderstanding.
Sterility and fertility
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was partly based on his reading of Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, an early 20th century academic book (1920) identifying the roots of romance in pre-Christian fertility rites associated with spring and the rebirth of the natural world. Thus the novel deals very heavily and thoroughly with sex – not romance – sex, in all positions and circumstances between all possible combinations of characters (see below for more about the sex in the book).
In a rather touching thread the ageing American academic Arthur Kingfisher (a jokey reference to the central role of the Fisher King in The Waste Land, itself a reference to pagan myths about the sterile king presiding over a barren country) has become impotent and associates it with his inability to generate new insights into literature. We meet him at intervals throughout the book, in various hotel rooms, being stimulated by his sexy Korean secretary, Song-mi Lee, and forever wanly failing to get an erection. In the final pages he experiences a physical and mental rebirth and finally gets it up, on the back of which revival of virility he proposes to his secretary, in one of the few actually ‘romantic’ gestures in the novel.
In fact, the closing pages describe a rebirth which affects not just Kingfisher but all the characters in the book.
They are set at the annual mega-conference of the Modern Languages association, the grand-daddy of literary conferences, attended by up to 10,000 academics all jostling for position, networking and seeking jobs. In the novel this one is being held in New York just after Christmas, a city famous for its freezing winters. And yet, at the climax of the novel, there is a freak outbreak of warm weather, characters open the windows to let in sweet spring air and experience epiphanies: Arthur Kingfisher gets an erection, Desirée Zapp (divorced wife of the exuberant Morris Zapp) realises her non-fiction book is good after all, the ageing English novelist, Robert Frobisher, who’s been blocked for eight years, suddenly conceives the first line of a new novel, and so on.
It is a happy ending for most of the characters, and it is based on the theme and numerous incidental details, of fertility arising in the dead land.
The business of literature
Maybe this all sounds terribly contrived, but it reads perfectly naturally because the overt subject of the novel is the hectic travel schedules and love lives of a host of modern academics and writers, and since they talk of nothing except literature and sex (and literary theory and jobs and grants and money) it is perfectly reasonable that literature and sex dominate the text.
The ‘story’ is entirely about characters thinking, eating and breathing literature and literary criticism, attending conferences, and writing papers, about Shakespeare or the Romantic poets or Icelandic sagas or Augustan satire or any of a host of other academic subjects which are raised and discussed by all concerned. The content couldn’t be more academic. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for the entire novel to be based on a literary archetype, and to be strewn with literary references at every level.
And anyone expecting literary critics to spend their time discussing the moral or spiritually elevating nature of the art they handle will be bitterly disillusioned. The text is stuffed with insights, comments and asides on the dog-eat-dog nature of the contemporary academic world, and the cut-throat competition to develop and promulgate the next anti-humanist, technocratic and unconventional literary theory. (There is a handy summary of the ideal career path on page 151.)
Morris Zapp is such a great comic creation because he is the most cynical of careerists – his ambition is to become the highest-paid academic in the world and he explains several times to the naive Persse just how cunning and calculating you have to be to forge a career in modern literary studies – but he is also strangely loveable, unhealthily puffing on his outsize cigars, having long angry phone calls with his venomous ex-wife, sitting in his hotel room watching the porn channel while he explains structuralism to a dazed beginner.
Comedy
But many of the situations are straight-out funny without any allusions or special knowledge. The comedy can perhaps be categorised into types:
The extended comic situation
A particularly unpleasant academic, the linguist Robin Dempsey (who we saw Philip Sparrow inadvertently pass over for promotion in Changing Places) through a further set of coincidences develops a loathing for Sparrow, whose career (and sex life) go stratospheric once he gets onto the international conference circuit. Dempsey tries out a new experimental computer program being developed on his campus, which is designed to offer the user the probing questions and sympathetic responses of an agony aunt or therapist. Very slowly, Dempsey finds himself spending more time in the computer room typing his problems onto the primitive screen and waiting for the computer’s replies (‘Tell me more about your divorce’) which prompt him to ever-longer frenzies of typing.
It is one of the novel’s funnier strands to return to Dempsey at intervals to witness his slow descent into crippling dependency on the machine, and Lodge’s writing is absolutely pitch perfect in creating the blank, affectless but somehow provoking prose style for the machine.
But the whole gag steps up a gear when the geeky technician who created and maintains the machine starts to get resentful at the amount of time Dempsey is hogging it for, and starts to interfere with the replies, slowly steadily shifting the program’s responses from the neutral to the deliberately provocative. This running gag climaxes withl the stunning moment when Dempsey types, ‘What shall I do?’ and the computer comes back, quick as a flash – ‘Shoot yourself’ – at which moment Dempsey realises he’s been had and his fury is magnificent to behold.
The farcical moment
Swallow, on his trip to Turkey, is intimidated by the armed soldiers everywhere and especially intimidated when he and the British Consul and his Turkish host go to pay their respects to the tomb of Atatürk. You’ll be fine, they tell him. Just do everything the Consul does. So they are nervously walking up the guard-lined avenue towards the tomb when the Consul accidentally trips and sprawls headlong – and is astonished to find Swallow manically copying his gesture and throwing himself headlong on the ground beside him.
Character as comic plight
The philosopher Henri Bergson said one of the roots of comedy is treating people like machines; there is something funny about predictability. (Tag lines are a sub-set of this approach: viewers of the old TV classic Dad’s Army are waiting for Captain Mainwaring to say ‘Stupid boy’, or Jonesy to say ‘They don’t like it up ’em’ or Fraser to say ‘We’re doomed’. There are innumerable similar tag-lines in hundreds of TV sitcoms.)
Thus one way to create a comic character is to make them embody a plight which they are doomed to mechanically reenact over and over again. So more or less the only thing about the ageing Angry Young novelist Robert Frobisher is his epic writer’s block, which is flung in his face by his wife and mentioned by everyone who knows him, and comes to seem more and more laughable.
Similarly, we keep getting shown the Australian academic Rodney Wainwright, sweating in North Queensland over the paper he’s due to deliver at a conference which hasn’t got past the first paragraph, while he fantasises about all his young students out freely frolicking on the beach. And each time we return to him, his plight seems more intense and funny.
In Turkey we are introduced to Dr Akbil Borak, who will be hosting Philip Swallow on the latter’s lecture visit to Ankara. Swallow has recently published his (very old-fashioned critical book) about the Romantic essayist, William Hazlitt, and so we periodically drop in on Borak throughout the novel, gamely reading his way through the university’s 25-volume edition of the Complete Writings of Hazlitt, and peppering his conversation with quotes from the latest Volume he’s just finished.
Maybe none of these look so funny here, but it’s a testament to Lodge’s brilliant comic timing that we return to each of these characters at unexpected moments, when we’ve more or less forgotten about them, to find them in ever-more inventive and absurd complications of their plights.
Comic dialogue
The pompous old Oxford don Rudyard Parkinson is showing off his grand literary connections to a graduate student.
‘I’m not much of an expert on air travel,’ said the young man. ‘A charter flight to Majorca is about the limit of my experience.’
‘Majorca? Ah yes, I remember visiting Robert Graves there once.Did you happen to meet him?’
‘No,’ said the post-graduate. ‘It was a package holiday. Robert Graves wasn’t included.’
Rudyard Parkinson glanced at the young man with momentary suspicion. (p.157)
The one-liner
Hilary snorted derisively. ‘Matthew says that when I run I look like a blancmange in a panic.’ (p.58)
‘There was a story in the paper the other day, about a man who’d had a heart attack and asked his doctor if it was safe to have sexual intercourse, and the doctor said,”Yes, it’s good exercise, but nothing too exciting, just with your wife.”‘ (p.62)
Romance and sex
‘It all comes down to sex, in the end,’ Miss Maiden declared firmly. ‘The life force endlessly renewing itself.’ (p.12)
Before reading David Lodge’s novels, I read about 40 thrillers and spy novels from the 1930s to the 1980s and, despite their reputation, there is actually more sex in one David Lodge novel than in all those 40 thrillers put together. If Lodge’s novels are to be believed, Roman Catholics and literary academics are at it, hammer and tongs, every day. Things get off to a gentle start with the mere ogling of outstanding breasts.
[Persse] inclined his head towards the magnificent bosom, appreciating, now, why Professor Swallow had appeared to be almost nuzzling it in his attempt to read the badge pinned there… (p.9)
[Angela’s] beauty looked a little tousled, and she was out of breath – indeed her bosom was swelling and sinking in the most amazing fashion under the high-necked white silk blouse she was wearing. (p.37)
But anyone who’s read this novel’s predecessor, How Far Can You Go, with its cool and clinical descriptions of sexual activities, won’t be too surprised by the graphicness of the scene where the virginal Persse pops into a porn cinema, supposedly to find out what the fuss is all about.
The images on the screen shifted, close-up gave way to a wider, deeper perspective, and it became apparent that the owner of the vagina had another penis in her mouth, and the owner of the first penis had his tongue in another vagina, whose owner in turn had a finger in someone else’s anus, whose penis was in her vagina; and all were in frantic motion, like the pistons of some infernal machine… The moans and groans rose to a crescendo, the pistons jerked faster and faster, and Persse registered with shame that he had polluted himself. (p.49)
That’s more like the Lodge I’ve gotten used to. And now the subject has been graphically broached, there’s no holding back:
Swallow tells Zapp about the woman he had an affair with years earlier:
Then we made love. There was nothing particularly subtle or prolonged about it, but I’ve never had an orgasm like it, before or since. I felt I was defying death, fucking my way out of the grave. (p.74)
Zapp’s ex-wife, at her writer’s retreat in America, can’t sleep for worry about her new book.
Desirée wonders whether to try and relax with the help of her vibrator, but it is an instrument she uses, as a nun her discipline, more out of principle than real enthusiasm, and besides, the battery is nearly flat, it might run out of juice before she reached her climax – just like a man. (p.87)
Flying to the latest conference, humourless creep Howard Ringbaum tries to get his wife to help him join the Mile High Club.
In the same airplane, some forty metres to the rear of Fulvia Morgana, Howard Ringbaum is trying to persuade his wife Thelma to have sexual intercourse with him, there and then, in the back row of the economy section… ‘Take off your pants and sit on my prick,’ says Howard Ringbaum, unsmilingly. (p.91)
The impotent Arthur Kingfisher receives his nightly attentions from his devoted Oriental acolyte.
Kneeling on the bed beside the man, in the space between his left arm and his left leg, is a shapely young Oriental woman, with long, straight, shining black hair falling down over her golden-hued body. Her only garment is a tiny cache-sexe of black silk. She is massaging the man’s scrawny limbs and torso with a lightly perfumed mineral oil, paying particular attention to his long, thin, uncircumcised penis. (p.93)
Back home in England, Philip snuggles up to his wife, Hilary.
He snuggled up to her spoonwise, curving himself around the soft cushion of her buttocks, passing his arm around her waist and cupping one heavy breast in his hand. Unable to sleep, he became sexually excited, lifted Hilary’s nightdress and began to caress her belly and crotch. She seemed moist and compliant, though he was not sure if she was fully awake… (p.95)
Fulvia Morgana drives Zapp back to her luxury Italian villa and makes it clear she is available.
Morris ran his hands down her back and over her hips. She appeared to be wearing nothing underneath the white robe. He felt desire stirring in him like dull roots after spring rain. (p.136)
Bertha is the wife of ex-Wehrmacht tank driver and fearsome German literary theorist, Siegfried von Turpitz who, in one of the novel’s countless running gags, always wears a black leather glove on one hand to conceal some terrible wartime injury and to intimidate people with.
When he comes to her bed she is not always sure, in the dark, whether it is a penis or a leather-sheathed finger that probes the folds and orifices of her body. (p.144)
Felix Skinner is the disorganised, shabby, randy publisher of Philip Swallow’s bad book about Hazlitt.
Felix Skinner was in fact already back from lunch at the time of Philip Swallow’s phone call. He was, to be precise, in a basement storeroom on the premises of Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein. He was also, to be even more precise, in Gloria, who was bent forwards over a pile of cardboard boxes, divested of her skirt and knickers, while Felix, with his pinstripe trousers around his ankles, and knees flexed in a simian crouch, copulated with her vigorously from behind. (p.160)
In a rather touching plot strand, Philip is reunited in Turkey the woman he had a brief affair with years earlier and, as with almost all Lodge characters, this is the prelude to days and days of love-making.
When the sun shone full upon the window, he angled the blinds so that bars of white-hot light striped Joy’s body, kindling her blonde pubic hair into flame. He called it the golden fleece, mindful that the Hellespont was not far away. When he kissed her there, his beard brushing her belly, he made a wry joke about the silver among the gold… He nuzzled her, inhaling odours of shore and rockpool; the skin of her inner thighs was as tender as peeled mushrooms; she tasted clean and salty, like some mollusc from the sea. (p.226)
And much, much more in the same vein.
Where does all this sex in David Lodge’s novels come from? You could argue that the romances he’s referencing are all about love and fertility; and The Faerie Queene is surprisingly overt about sexual encounters. But obviously nothing like this.
Maybe he’s accurately conveying what it felt like to be born in 1935, to grow up a young man in the ferociously repressed 1950s, and to live on into the astonishingly liberated 1970s (the novel is set in 1979, exactly 10 years after the date of its prequel, Changing Places)? So it is an accurately 20th century recasting of the theme of fertility, it is modern fertility in (all kinds of) action.
And maybe he knows that sex is strange, unpredictable, disruptive, comic in the deeper sense without being laugh-out-loud funny. Sex is where human beings often find a kind of secular redemption, just as often experience disgust and humiliation – but either way, it punctures any pretensions we may have to being ‘higher’, spiritual beings.
Literary criticism as pornography
Also, Lodge is undoubtedly reflecting the trend in Literary Studies in the 1970s to turn away from ‘traditional’ questions of morality and character and towards questions of language and meaning which, unexpectedly – following the sensual evolution of French post-structuralist thinkers like Barthes and Foucault – turned out to be dripping in sexual overtones. (See, for example, the use of the concept of jouissance/orgasm in French literary and feminist theory.) If you think literary criticism is about discussing the moral choices of characters in novels, then modern specialisms like Queer studies will make your hair stand on end.
Thus Zapp – the ahead-of-the-curve, highly professional and competitive American academic – delivers a paper to a conference about ‘Literary Criticism as Striptease’ in which he doesn’t shy away from describing a striptease in detail, and the way the reader/voyeur ends up not only staring at the stripper’s vagina, but closely examining it and trying to escape up it back into the womb! And the heroine, Angelica Pabst, delivers a paper late on in the novel which gives a Freudian explanation of the way that, if epic is the phallic genre and tragedy is about castration, then romance is the vaginal genre, a source of unending desire and fascination but which, once entered, turns out to be an empty space.
Seen from another angle, those other genres are male in that they lead to one-off, generally bloody climaxes, just as male desire all builds through foreplay to the one big ejaculation. Whereas romance is a feminine genre, where complex storylines entwine and lead to numerous climaxes, none of which ends the story, but merely sets the scene for further quests and further climaxes, as a woman can climax multiple times to the man’s one-off effort.
I’ve heard and read English lit papers like that. (What makes it comic is the description of the stunned English audience of Zapp’s rodomontade, the women who noisily walk out, and the young man who faints at the climax of the paper.) These are not exaggerations. In fact they’re both genuinely insightful papers, of the kind that makes and sustains careers in contemporary literary theory.
And they both go some way to explaining how the study of literature – which for our parents was something to do with morality and spiritual values – had become by the 1970s absolutely soaked in sexual language and imagery, creating the perfervid atmosphere in which the academics themselves all too easily give way to the temptation to rut like rabbits.
And expose themselves to the satirical eye of a comic writer of genius like Lodge.
Computers
Worth noting Lodge’s engagement with computers as early as the novel’s setting, 1979. I’ve described the Dempsey-computer plotline at length. Turns out the blocked writer-Robert Frobisher strand is also computer-related. After a disastrous literary party aboard a houseboat on the Thames, a tipsy Frobisher explains to Persse the origin of his block. He was invited to a university where bright young things had been studying his works with the aid of a computer. They had fed it his complete works and then asked it to analyse his style. Thus, during his visit, they ask Frobisher what he thinks his favourite word is (after excluding ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’, all the obvious connnectives). Joy, beauty, hope? he wonders. No. ‘Greasy’. ‘Greasy’ is the word he uses more than any other. Along with ‘grim’ and ‘grey’. They rattle off sentences from his oeuvre with these words in. Then reveal lots of other aspects of his style. Then show him pastiche sentences they’ve made up using the computer analysis.
Next morning, back at his desk, Frobisher sits down to write and… can’t. Can’t think of a thing to say which doesn’t include what he now, fatally, knows to be his favourite words or phrases. Tries writing sentences with them and is horrified. Tries writing sentences deliberately avoiding them but they don’t seem right. Stares at the empty page all morning, then gives up. Been like that for the past eight years.
It is a typical Lodge incident: not only does he understand the possibilities of computers, he can already seen their potential for harm as well as good, and for comedy. Positioned where it is – just after the literary party – and told late one drunken night to Persse, it manages to be both very funny and also very sad. Clever, penetrating, very funny, poignant – the Lodge Effect.
This is a brilliant novel, brilliantly clever and brilliantly funny, surely one of the best comic novels in English since the war.
Reviews of David Lodge novels
1960 – The Picturegoers – An ensemble piece following the lives of various characters in the fictional London suburb of Brickley, all linked by their attendance at their local cinema, the Palladium, as they fall in and out of love, practice various degrees of Catholicism and worry about sex.
1962 – Ginger, You’re Barmy – Jonathan Browne is fresh from gaining a First in English when he is plunged into National Service among brutal proles and cruel NCOs in a windswept barracks in Yorkshire. Onto this amiable backdrop is nailed a melodramatic story about his friend at university, Mike the ginger-haired renegade of the title, attacking a cruel NCO, being imprisoned, being spring by the IRA, and then forced to return to make a raid on the barracks which Jonathan, by freakish coincidence, ends up foiling.
1965 – The British Museum Is Falling Down – a day in the life of young academic Adam Appleby, unhappy Catholic father of three, who spends a day at the BM failing to do any research and finds himself embroiled in more and more comic complexities, all the time panic-stricken that his wife might be pregnant for an unbearable fourth time.
1970 – Out of the Shelter – the boyhood and teenage years of Timothy Young, child of very ordinary suburban London parents, who is a toddler during the Blitz, a boy at the end of the war, and a teenager when he goes to stay with his older sister in post-war Germany, where he makes all kinds of discoveries about war and peace and life and love.
1975 – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – It is January 1969 and two English Literature professors are swapping jobs for a term: down-trodden Englishman Philip Swallow is heading for the Californian delights of Euphoria State University, and lit crit superstar Morris Zapp is heading towards rundown rainy Rummidge University. How will they cope with the resulting culture shocks? A hilariously knowing romp, a sophisticated comedy classic.
1980 – How Far Can You Go? – The stories of ten young Catholic students in the 1950s, following their adventures as they mature during the 1960s and 70s, with extensive commentary about the sweeping changes to Catholic dogma during this period, and lots and lots of clinical descriptions of sex, in a surprisingly flat and unentertaining novel.
1984 – Small World: An Academic Romance – a brilliantly conceived comedy of manners satirising the world of modern literary scholarship with its cast of jetsetting, globe-trotting, back-stabbing, vaultingly ambitious and goatishly lecherous academics, led by the protagonists of Changing Places, but with a whole lot more characters added, all travelling, questing and falling in and out of love in the artfully contrived and very funny modern-day equivalent of a medieval romance. (A pilgrimage novel)
1988 – Nice Work – feminist literary academic Robyn Penrose reluctantly takes part in the university’s scheme to shadow figures from local industry, being assigned to the equally reluctant Vic Wilcox, Managing Director of J. Pringle and Sons, a local metal-working factory. Initially antagonistic, they open each other’s eyes to new worlds, rather inevitably, fall in love, but then go beyond that to reach a more mature and realistic friendship.
1991 – Paradise News – Agnostic priest Bernard Walsh is rung up by his dying aunt Ursula who lives in Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to come visit her and bring his father (her brother). Thus begins a ‘holiday’ in ‘paradise’ in which old family secrets are disinterred, old wounds healed, and new life begins. (A pilgrimage novel)
1995 – Therapy – Successful TV scriptwriter Laurence Passmore has it all – hit show, sexy wife, grown-up kids flown the nest, big house, flash car – but is still obscurely unhappy, a problem which turns into a plight when his wife abruptly sues for divorce and he seeks refuge in the past as his life falls apart. (A pilgrimage novel)
2001 – Thinks… – At the (fictional) University of Gloucester, clever, lecherous, married cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger seduces bereaved novelist Helen Reed, in a story sprinkled with lectures on artificial intelligence which feel as if they’ve been cut & pasted from the popular science books of the 1990s.
2004 – Author, Author – A long and fascinating account of Henry James’s life from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s as he attempted to branch out from writing novels and short stories with a sustained attempt to write plays for the stage, which proved, in the end, to be a humiliating failure – all told in a book which is saturated with interesting stories and gossip from the era.
2008 – Deaf Sentence – A return to the ‘contemporary’ novel, in which Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics struggling with his growing deafness and difficult family, a fractious second wife, a senile father and a dangerously predatory American PhD student, an initially humdrum tale which moves towards some surprisingly dark and harrowing scenes.
2011 – A Man of Parts – A very long novel in which science fiction pioneer, novelist, political columnist and all-purpose social ‘prophet’, H.G. Wells, looks back over his life and recounts in squelchy detail his many, many sexual conquests.
Books & Boots 