‘Imagine what the Richmonds’ dinner party would have been like, if everyone had had those bubbles over their heads that you get in kids’ comics, with “Thinks…” inside them.’…
‘I suppose that’s why people read novels,’ she says. ‘To find out what goes on in other peoples’ heads.’
‘But all they really find out is what has gone on in the writer’s head. It’s not real knowledge.’
‘Oh, what is real knowledge, then?’
‘Scientific knowledge.’
(Thinks…, page 42)
The plot
Self-doubting and recently bereaved lady novelist Helen Reed hesitantly takes up a position teaching creative writing at the (fictional) University of Gloucester. Along with the rest of the faculty she meets cognitive scientist and media star, Ralph Messenger, secure in the bosom of his rich American wife, four kids and big house in the country. He gives her (and the reader) a Brody’s Notes-level introduction to the newly fashionable sciences of artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology and so on, touching on other topics which came to popular attention in the 1990s, such as chaos theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
Helen is not only a novelist but a lapsed Catholic and so, rather predictably, responds to Messenger’s confident scientism with her belief that you can’t reduce consciousness to algorithms, graphs and charts -surely there is some meaning to the universe, what about our feelings etc.
Via the stream-of-consciousness tape recordings Messenger is making to ‘capture’ his thoughts in flight, we learn the rather predictable fact that he is scheming to screw Helen. Via her sensitive diary, we learn that Helen is tempted but recoils, but is tempted again, but recoils etc. No but yes but no.
The text consists of Messenger’s tape recordings, Helen’s diary, and a third-person omniscient narrator, often covering the same incidents from different points of view. This is a fairly interesting idea, but in practice a little dull, since it is devoted entirely to the subject of middle-aged academics pondering at great length their adulterous affairs.
The text is also interspersed with essays and assignments by Helen’s creative writing students. These score ten on the clever-clogs-ometer for being done in the style of a range of bang-up-to-date 1990s authors, such as Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Salman Rushdie et al.
Halfway through the novel Helen discovers that her dead husband – an award-winning BBC radio documentary maker and hitherto a mournful memory – had been systematically unfaithful to her. This is cleverly (and amusingly?) done, because Helen reads an account of her husband’s sexual technique and peccadilloes in a piece of fiction written by one of her students. A bit of clandestine digging reveals that the said student was a ‘research assistant’ to her husband in the early 1990s. When she confronts her student, the latter confesses all and implies that her husband was notorious for seducing his research assistants and having it off whenever he was away on location.
All this comes as a devastating thunderbolt to Helen but made me laugh out loud. Because a) in terms of her character, it shows that being a sensitive lady novelist with two published books does not make you a lofty exception to the human race, does not mean you are especially intelligent or have special insight into other people. In fact, the opposite.
He must have been very, very careful. Or perhaps it was just me who was very stupid, very unobservant, very trusting. (p.202)
Quite. b) In terms of the plot, it very conveniently means that she is not only now ‘available’ for sex, but vows to make up for lost time. Messenger’s boat has come in.
Common themes in David Lodge’s fiction
This is David Lodge’s 11th novel and certain patterns in his fiction are very apparent:
- there will be a lot of embarrassingly blunt sexual descriptions
- one or more of the protagonists will be experts on an academic subject and not shy about lecturing the reader on it
- one or more of the characters will be a Roman Catholic liable, at the drop of a chasuble, to conjure up memories of their cramped, traditional religious upbringing and how they heroically overcame it
- there will be ‘formal’ tricksiness ie Sunday supplement experimentalism (eg the deployment of the clever literary pastiches mentioned above)
- a male and female character will journey towards reconciliation and love
Sex
Oh dear. The male lead, cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger, is as randy as a goat on heat. The novel opens with a transcript of him recording his secret, innermost thoughts, trying to catch the free association of ideas in action:
I recorded us in bed to test the range of the condenser mike, left it running on the chair with my clothes without her knowing… she made a lot of noise when she came I like that in a woman… What a lot of pubic hair she had, black and springy and densely woven, like a birdsnest, you wouldn’t have been surprised to find a little white egg warm inside her labia… (p.2)
Maybe I’m very prudish but I think the novelist has to earn the right to be this blunt about sex in general, and have the good manners to introduce us to the characters as human beings before giving us dreamy descriptions of their labia. D.H. Lawrence takes a long time setting the scene and ambience before the famous rude scenes in Lady Chatterley. By contrast, opening a Lodge novel is like turning on a TV to be instantly confronted by a big close up of penises shoving into vaginas amid howls and grunts. Maybe that is progress.
As the novel progresses Messenger gravitates from using a tape-recorder to a computer transcription program. When he’s wondering what to describe to test out the new transcription device, he was a brainwave – he’ll describe his ‘first fuck’ (p.73) – which leads him into a sequence of reminiscences about being in a strip joint, being discovered swimming naked when he was a teenager, and so on, complete with plenty of erections and ejaculations.
she laughed softly and came over and stood in front of me so I was staring straight at her crotch sparsely fleeced with ginger pubic hair veiling but not concealing the pinky-brown crease of her cunt… (p.78)
A little later, he ponders the plight (as he sees it) of being homosexual:
What a deprivation, not to find the bodies of women attractive, their curves and their cunts and all the other fascinating differences from women… (p.116)
The novel is divided broadly into three points of view: the prim and proper diary which Helen Reed is keeping; an objective 3rd-person narrator; and Messenger’s stream-of-consciousness passages. The heart sinks when you come to every new Messenger section, for we are never very far from pricks and cunts.
It is odd that Lodge’s later novels regularly include figures who worry about the high moral purpose of art, of the value of the soul, of the imagination etc, sometimes almost as if they mean it – but the texts themselves routinely return us to an unpleasantly male gaze, a coarse objectifying of women, the brutal use of the crudest possible language.
I had time for a quick appraisal as she shrugged off her robe and climbed into the tub.. the tits are a little low slung and wide apart, but shapely and firm… they bounced perceptibly – with their own elasticity, not the cotton latex, as she stepped into the tub… in fact only a tiny strip of material, not much more than an inch wide, prevented me from staring right up her fanny… (p.117)
Comments like that, if written or even spoken aloud, would get you sacked for gross misconduct in most modern work-places. Yet slip them into a cleverly-structured, large-format Penguin paperback and this kind of vulgar language and grossly objectifying attitude wins literary prizes.
I’d like to fuck Emily [his step-daughter]…. Helen Reed, yes, I’d like to fuck her too… (p.118)
Speaking of his teenage step-daughter:
That time I saw her naked about a year ago, when I walked into the family bathroom, looking for something, and she was having a bath… just glimpsed her taut adolescent breasts gleaming wet with big brown aureoles and pointed nipples before I turned on my heel and walked out… (p.117)
No doubt the defense is that the very point of the stream-of-consciousness is to reveal everything, no matter how embarrassing, about a character. OK. But it seems to me a failure of imagination to think that revelations, secrets and embarrassments have to and can only be sexual revelations, secrets and embarrassments. There is more to human beings than screwing. On top of which, it feels lame that this extremely limited view of human nature can itself only be expressed by the monotonous repetition of the crudest language.
my tumescent cock… given me a tremendous hard-on (78)… panting for breath and with an erection like a broomstick (118)… I had to stay behind in the tub till my hard-on subsided (148)… if it happened that he lost his erection it didn’t matter (177)… How eager the young men were, how impatient their quivering erections (178).. It isn’t easy to drive with an erection (p.256)…
Male and female
Changing Places was structured around the comparison between go-getting American academic Morris Zapp and shy, bumbling English lecturer Philip Swallow.
Nice Work was structured around the contrast between high-falutin’ literary expert Robyn Penrose and hard-headed industrialist Vic Wilcox.
Thinks… is another dichotomy built around the opposition of Dr Ralph Messenger (male, scientist, rational) and Helen Reed (woman, novelist, feeling). Ralph is all aggressive rationalism and long lectures about current thinking in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Helen was already a deeply sensitive person, and is now prone to even more intense feelings due to the recent, unexpected death of her husband (which also, of course, makes her conveniently available for a love affair).
Woman meets man = Sex. Or 300 pages of well-mannered foreplay rotating round and round the subject of sex. Again and again, I thought: Just get on and fuck him, for God’s sake, and then progress to the next, equally predictable stage – reams of high-minded literary regret.
Cognitive science
In his 1920s the novelist Aldous Huxley set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it. Nancy Cunard said you could tell which letter he was up to by his conversation. If it was all about hormones, horses and hysteria, he was up to… H! Something similar can be applied to Lodge. What has he been reading up on to turn into the theme of his next novel?
In his previous novel, Therapy, Lodge had obviously been reading the work of Søren Kierkegård because the protagonist of that novel gives us frequent expositions of the Danish philosopher’s theories, ethics and religious beliefs, as well as his biography, and eventually ends up travelling to Copenhagen to visit the Kierkegård museum and the places where the Great Dane lived and loved. Lodge is nothing if not thorough.
In the run-up to this novel Lodge has read intensively around the subjects of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and related fields. We know this because of the two-page acknowledgement at the back of the book which thanks various cognitive scientists for their help and encouragement, and includes an impressive reading list.
The novel is, therefore, an exercise in weaving Lodge’s characteristically clear, plain and forthright expositions of this branch of science into the more mundane love story between the randy science professor and the sensitive lady novelist.
Will there be misunderstandings and arguments? Will they squabble about the relative importance of science versus art, of evidence versus emotion? Will there be a lot of expository prose about cognitive science and artificial intelligence and qualia and affective modelling and genetic algorithms? Yes. Lots.
- Genetic algorithms are computer programs designed to replicate themselves like biological life forms (p.45)
- Affective modelling is computer simulation of the way emotions affect human behaviour (p.45)
- qualia – the specific quality of our subjective experiences of the world – like the smell of coffee, or the taste of pineapple (p.36)
- ‘Mentalese’ – some kind of preverbal medium of consciousness which at a certain point, for certain purposes, gets articulated by the particular parts of the brain that specialise in speech (p.37)
- The Prisoner’s Dilemma (p.51)
- Schrödinger’s Cat (p.54)
- Locked-in syndrome (p.86)
- Very small particles behave like waves, in random and unpredictable ways,’ says Douglas. ‘When we make a measurement, we cause the wave to collapse. It’s been suggested that the phenomenon of consciousness is a series of continuous collapses of the wave function.’ (p.127)
- ‘Heisenberg demonstrated that you cannot accurately specify both the position and the speed of a particle. If you get one right, you get the other wrong.’ (p.128)
- ‘Chaos theory deals with systems that are unusually sensitive to variations in their initial conditions or affected by a large number of independent variables. Like the weather, for instance.’ (p.128)
- ‘TOM. Theory of Mind. Knowing that other people may interpret the world differently from yourself. The ability to lie depends on it. Most children acquire it at age three or four. Autistics never do.’ (p.134)
My son’s doing philosophy A-Level and I am surprised at the high standard of information and debate required for the subject. This novel is not pitched as high as A-Level. It raises various school debating society issues, but almost all in conversation, in dialogue, briefly, without going into depth: Is there a soul or are our minds just complex computers? Is life meaningful if there is no afterlife, or is it horribly pointless? —
When Lodge quotes from his sources (as above) the text is densely factual. But when he dramatises them into the mouths of his characters, especially the dim lady novelist, they are all too easily dumbed down into jokey dialogue. One of the characters has an autistic son: when Helen has one of the AI programs explained to her (it can process information but has no emotions) she quips that it is autistic. Having had chaos theory explained to her, she watches the annual rubber duck race on a nearby river, held for charity: and points out to the prof that what determines which duck gets into the lead is tiny variations in the initial conditions: Helen’s Chaos theory of Ducks! Boom boom. See how the novelist has dramatised these complex scientific theories for the benefit of us stupid people.
Is all this thorough learning integrated into the narrative of the novel? No. It would have been riveting if the plot had somehow turned on developments in AI, if one of the computer programs or experiments had somehow caused a crucial plot development. (Something like this in fact happens in Robert Harris’s thriller, The Fear Index, where an artificially intelligent algorithm designed to play the stock market starts to flex its muscles.) But here? No. The core of the novel is simply about a randy male academic who wants to sleep with an attractive female academic. The scientific elements appear from time to time as topics of conversation like any other, in among the hum of chat about the General Election or young people these days or the future of higher education or nice pubs in Gloucestershire.
Roman Catholicism
There’s always at least one Catholic character in a Lodge novel (some are entirely about Roman Catholic teaching and its recent history, such as The British Museum Is Falling Down or How Far Can You Go?).
The Catholic in this novel is the creative writing teacher, Helen Reed. She abandoned her faith decades ago, when a student, but her husband recently died of a brain haemorrhage and she now finds herself (very predictably) attracted to the campus chapel, nostalgically hankering for the religious certainties of her childhood faith. Yawn. When she visits her parents at Easter she is drawn back to the elaborate rituals of the weekend of special services. And when she discusses the mind, consciousness and fiction with her polar opposite, the alpha male scientist, Helen draws on convenient snippets of Christian belief to perform her allotted role in the novel’s scheme: as representative of the “lady novelist / emotions and empathy / but surely the universe has some meaning?” school of argument.
‘But aren’t there areas of human experience where scientific method doesn’t apply?’
‘Qualia, you mean?’
‘I suppose so,’ [Helen] said. ‘I was thinking of happiness, unhappiness. The sense of the sublime. Love.’ (p.229)
Dear oh dear. She is made out to be laugh-out-loud dim and – the point of her not realising her husband was unfaithful – completely unperceptive about other people. But like many dim people, she takes her own inability to follow an argument or to weigh the evidence systematically, as a virtue, as a proof that her own vague post-Christian vapourings about souls and spirits and the universe and feeling, are somehow more true, more authentic, more real than yukky science.
Bourgeois world
After Small World, Lodge appears to have made a conscious choice not to return to the cartoony, comic exuberance of that and its predecessor novels. Although comedic in structure (they have happy endings) and often funny in occasional details, Nice Work, Paradise News, Therapy and Thinks… address more ‘serious’ subjects and seem to be trying to treat them in a more adult style. Lacking the zany improbabilities of the comic novels, they become more ‘realistic’ in tone and approach.
1. I read the news today…
One sign of this is the foregrounding of contemporary news and issues in the text. All these novels are set in very carefully defined time periods. Often (in Therapy and here) the majority of the text consists of journals or diaries where Lodge is able to tie the characters’ thoughts or events to specific dates in specific years, and to reference the political events, the economic background and the news stories to create a ‘realistic’ timeframe for the narrative (the Jamie Bulger case, Squidgygate, the bombing of Sarajevo etc in Therapy).
In this novel it is the build-up to the General Election in May 1997 which ended 18 years of Conservative government, and inaugurated 13 years of New Labour rule. (Typically, Messenger and Helen have sex on the momentous night itself. Sex overrides every other value in these novels.)
However, I’m not sure this tactic really works. I argued in my review of Therapy that just referring to contemporary events without somehow integrating them into the plot or narrative has the paradoxical effect of making the narratives appear shallower, as if the stories are themselves as trite and throwaway as the daily papers.
2. Bourgeoisification
But the other noticeable trend in these post-comic novels is the increasing embourgeoisement of the characters. The clever grammar school boy swept up into National Service in Ginger, You’re Barmy or whose childhood and youth are sensitively described in Out Of The Shelter are exceptional, maybe, in their precocious intelligence, but act as windows onto a broader social scene, the working class squaddies in Ginger or American-dominated post-war Germany. The academic world of Changing Places and Small World is deliberately exaggerated to cartoon colourfulness for our amusement, and generally features comically poor, struggling, up-and-coming, frustrated, stymied and accident-prone academics.
But in these later novels the characters have made it. They are successful and they enjoy the conventional trappings of success. In Therapy the protagonist has a big house in the Midlands (with four loos), a flash car and a handy flat in central London. In Thinks… the lady novelist’s books have won prizes, she has a house in London, her parents have a nice retirement home in Southwold; the male protagonist, Ralph Messenger, has a house on the university campus and another fabulous house in the country, with a hot tub set on a slope with a commanding view, which the characters luxuriate in while discussing the nature of consciousness and the problem of point-of-view in fiction. (Or looking at the women’s tits, if you’re Messenger.)
There is lots of fine dining. More attention is paid than before to the brands of food and – maybe the most salient marker of English bourgeois life – of wine. Messenger likes his wines and, characteristically, uses them to try and get women drunk and into bed. In line with her role as the representative of Henry James and religious feeling and fine sensibility, it is the lady novelist through whose eyes we see the middle-class dinner parties and cocktail parties and birthday parties, the lovely house in the country, the charming town of Cheltenham with its lovely Regency architecture and charming curio shops which sell such lovely trinkets and the charming pubs in the lovely villages around Gloucester which serve such wonderful lunches.
After Helen has visited the wonderful church of Ledbury and communed with the soul of Henry James, who also visited it and left such an exquisite diary entry about it, she returns to a just adorable pub she spotted in the village.
Logs smouldered in the big open fireplace, and there were spring flowers on every table – solid, unpolished wooden tables, with comfortable Windsor armchairs. Blackboards over the long bar listed an enticing and adventurous menu. I ordered garlic and herb tagliatelle with chilli prawns and sun-dried tomatoes, reserving the possibility of an orange truffle pot with Grand Marnier sauce for dessert. A smiling motherly waitress took my order, to which I added a large glass of the house Chardonnay. The first course, when it came, was as mouth-watering as its description promised. I could hardly believe my good fortune. (p.233)
The scene, the prose are like something from Cotswolds tourist board, like an upmarket review on TripAdvisor.
But it is, with thumping inevitability, on this little pilgrimage to an out-of-the-way church, in this well-appointed pub with its wonderful cuisine that Helen spots Messenger’s wife and another man clearly having an illicit meeting, obviously carrying on an affair.
It is the inevitability of the way that, in middle-class novels, it is always the formal dinner party or the lovely meal with the Chardonnay (or was it that wonderful Pouilly-Fuissé, darling?) or the trip to the exquisite restaurant, where one or other married character makes a pass at another married character, or so-and-so’s affair is discovered and there is the most horrendous scene.
I find this world – real enough as it is, and as I’ve experienced it at numerous tense dinner parties – narrow, limited, sticky and thick with hypocrisy, full of successful bankers and lawyers and academics guffawing and pouring you some more Beaujolais and telling you why Tony just has to support George because there definitely are weapons of mass destruction, you know, a good friend in the FO told me it’s all true, and Saddam Hussein is just such a beastly man. A hermetically sealed world of People Like Us who never let the ugly, uncongenial facts of existence disturb their cosy groupthink.
It is a world and a class which are hard not to find repellent in its cosseted smugness. I preferred Norman the pig man in Ginger, You’re Barmy – his memory makes me smile because he represented something unsmooth and rebarbative, something which couldn’t be bought off with another glass of this rather fine Nuits-Saint-Georges, a working-class aggression which turned out to have an oddly endearing sweetness about it, something unexpected and which therefore stretched my imagination and human sympathies. A rude honesty which reaches back through Shakespeare to Chaucer and medieval gargoyles.
More plot
But there’s more. Once she’s discovered her (now dead) husband was unfaithful to her, Helen – on the rebound – of course makes herself available to the nearest thrusting alpha male, Dr Messenger. She prepares carefully for a scene of touching and sensitive seduction, cleaning her small flat, changing the sheets, washing and putting on one of her nicest outfits. So far the female point of view. Messenger records it on his tape thus:
This afternoon I fucked one of England’s finest female novelists… She looked so attractive at Bourton-on-the-Water, in a close-fitting pair of white jeans that showed her shapely bum to advantage, and her breasts moving about interestingly under her sweater… I didn’t want to give her any time for second thoughts, and I soon discovered that there was no need for elaborate foreplay. In fact she came with astonishing rapidity, almost as soon as I entered her. (p.257)
(It helps for practical purposes that Messenger’s wife has been called to America to the bedside of her ailing father.)
Thus Helen allows Messenger to fuck her and, like millions of women before and since, wonders whether she is truly in love with him and just what her feelings are and whether she has somehow betrayed her loyalty to her dead husband and is there still some vestige of sin in adultery etc etc etc etc for page after page of her dim-witted self-absorbed journal — while Messenger just calculates all the different ways and places he can fuck her – in the jacuzzi, high on a sheep-covered hillside, in their country retreat quietly when the kids are asleep, in her flat, on top, from behind, ringing the changes and treating her like a hank of meat.
[Messenger] liked to get inside her quickly and copulate in various positions before he achieved his orgasm, bringing Helen to several in the meantime. He was immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and flipped her effortlessly this way and that, over and under him, like a wrestler practising ‘holds’. (p.263)
All of which crude abuse we read Helen rationalising to herself as just a rather boisterous expression of his love for her, his emotions for her, of the deep spiritual bond they have forged together. Pathetic stupid self delusion.
Crescendo and climax
After a fairly leisurely 280 pages the last 60 pick up speed as a number of plot strands converge:
- In chapter 23 Messenger had visited Prague, where his publisher had fixed him up with a slender beauty to show him round (and what do you think they do that night? Fuck? Correct.) Messenger vaguely promised her she could attend the summer conference at his university. Now she writes, taking him up on his promise and eventually threatening to reveal their affair (one fuck) to his wife.
- More dramatically, Messenger is diagnosed with a lump on the liver which dominates the final chapters. It is eventually revealed to be benign, a cyst caused by a parasite picked up during a youthful holiday working on a sheep farm. But the fear that it is cancer casts a pall over everyone. With crashing inevitability, it brings him and his wife closer together. He realises what a fool he’s been (lol), screwing around with the Czech woman, and then this crazy affair with Helen. He completely disengages from her. For her part, Helen is beside herself with concern and can’t understand why Messenger is suddenly so stand-offish (being unable to imagine that she was, all along, a glorified sex doll for a middle-aged sex maniac).
- On the night of the big conference a small plot strand explodes when the Child Pornography Unit of Gloucestershire Police arrive to announce that someone in his department has been downloading child pornography – an investigation which quickly takes them to Messenger’s number two, the angry, frustrated Professor Duggan, a perennial loser who never got over Messenger being appointed to the job he thought was his by rights and who – in a surprise move – hangs himself from shame.
- All of these incidents rushing together make Messenger immediately and logically realise he wants to terminate the fling with Helen. Apart from anything else, it is his American wife who is the rich one – in a divorce she would probably keep all the money, the house and the children. Yes, but better break it to her gently, old chap. Helen, characteristically, takes a lot longer and invokes the soul, art and Henry James before reaching pretty much the same conclusion. Her heart says one thing, her head says another – ‘I fear I love this man!’ (and so on).
In the final scene Messenger goes to her flat to tell her it’s over. She is late back from work. At a loose end he opens her laptop, starts to read her journal and is thunderstruck to discover that his wife, Carrie, is herself having an affair (from the entry Helen made about seeing Carrie with the man at the pub in Ledbury). Turns out Messenger doesn’t know what’s going on in other people’s heads, either.
Or: it turns out that just about every superior middle-class person in the book is totally available for affairs and flings, adultery and betrayal. It is a dispiritingly shallow view of the world and human nature, that all this expensive education, all this knowledge and insight, is put almost exclusively to the service of furtive fucking.
Morality and irresponsibility
Helen, in her high-mindedly self-deceiving way, thinks that all her windy hand-wringing about whether to fuck Messenger is essentially a moral question and (God help us) what novels mostly are and should be about. After the biggest computer in the world replicates all human thought processes, she states,
‘The same moral problems of love and lust, fidelity and betrayal, will remain.’ (p.299)
No doubt morality will remain, but I find the notion that morality is exclusively concerned with sexual behaviour – as this statement (and the whole novel) implies – to be constrictingly narrow and unattractive.
Freud, who knew a thing or two about human sexuality, says ‘morality is simple’. Are you going to betray your marriage vows, yes or no. If you think it will make you unhappy and is ‘wrong’, don’t do it.
This novel reminded me of Woody Allen’s films (not just because of the scene where he sexually fantasises about his step-daughter) but also because the characters can’t seem to behave like adults, can’t live by simple rules, can’t – and this is the point – deny themselves any pleasures they set their eyes on. It is a world where everyone wants to be happily married but also screw anyone they want to. Aaaaaaw mom, I wanna ice cream!!!
Like Allen’s films, this kind of novel teaches us nothing about ‘morality’, but a great deal about the self-centred, spoilt, childish kidults from the 80s and 90s who dress up their inability to act their age in fancy words and long-winded monologues about self-expression or life choices or qualia.
Morality is about respecting other people and helping and supporting them through a life which can often be difficult and painful, through bereavement and accident and disease and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, through the natural stages of loving and committing and parenting and caring for children, for your partner, for your parents when they become old and ill. It is about behaving with generosity and kindness, giving, helping, acting responsibly and rationally, overcoming difficulties and – through all of this – accepting that a large part of being an adult means self-denial.
Morality is not about having a well-paid job, a loving partner, living in a big house overflowing with food and over-educated friends – and agonising about who to fuck next. That is self-indulgence, indiscipline and decadence.
Satire?
The concluding question is: is this novel a satire? Does Lodge intend us to dislike and despise these characters as much as I do? The scientific gobbets are presented at face value. And so are the characters’ discussions of them. Helen’s upset at her husband’s death, and then of discovering his betrayal, seem serious. The child porn addict hanging himself – is that utterly serious, or does it smack a little of the savage farcical angle of a Tom Sharpe satire? Carrie’s father’s illness, Messenger’s own diagnosis with a liver condition – these are both presented ‘straight’, as if in a completely realistic novel where we are meant to sympathise with the characters’ plights and problems.
But surely Lodge cannot have created such a rapacious monster of egotism (Messenger) and such a self-absorbed, self-deceiving ninny as Helen, without realising it?
Lodge has been studying, teaching and writing novels for 50 years. Is he cannily creating space within the text for the reader to create the story they need? Some will warm to Helen’s tender-heartedness and read it as one woman’s journey to self-realisation; others might take from it the clever interweaving of up-to-date science with contemporary characters; randy men might warm to, or at least find hilarious, Messenger’s uninhibitedly frank sex talk.
Is a consistent take on the characters and the ‘story’ difficult because Lodge is deliberately deploying the material over a spectrum of ‘seriousness’, from the entirely heart-felt to the savagely ironic. The text very obviously consists of three main ‘voices’ (Messenger’s tape recordings, Helen’s diary entries, the omniscient narrator linking it all). Are there also different ‘registers of seriousness’ weaving across all three voices i.e. sometimes we’re meant to take their feelings and ideas seriously but at other times they are meant to be laughable and at other times… somewhere in between?
In the final page, looking back from some years later, the narrator records that Helen settles down with another writer and wins prizes for her novels, while Messenger is awarded the CBE for services to science. Is the novel serious in intention and satirical in outcome – both at the same time? Is official society’s recognition of this fine pair of boobies (prizes, honours) a parting gesture by Lodge which unmistakably marks the text as a satire on our values today, the way we live now? Or is the whole novel a sophisticated litmus test in which the reader’s response reveals more about him or her than about the author or his ‘intentions’?
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 