Book Corner – August 2019 (2)

Nice Work – David Lodge

This is the third book in what can loosely be described as Lodge’s Campus Trilogy. Loosely because the book, published in 1988, is set around the University of Rummidge and a few of the old faithful characters, Phillip Swallow, Morris Zapp and their two wives, make appearances and there are fleeting references to incidents in the earlier books. But that is all and the book probably stands on its own. Having given us his take on mediaeval romances in Small World, Lodge takes on the Victorian industrial novel. In a nutshell, it is what happens when Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South meets Thatcherism.

Left wing, feminist, English literature lecturer at the University of Rummidge, Robyn Penrose is Lodge’s Margaret Hale to his John Thornton, Victor Wilcox, an older, conservative, senior manager who lives a humdrum suburban existence with a wife, family and a house with four bathrooms. You get an insight into the mocking humour in the first couple of pages where Victor’s wife, Marjorie, is described as sitting in bed reading her favourite book, Enjoy your Menopause, and takes great pride in her en suite, in avocado, naturally.

This unlikely pair are brought together courtesy of a government initiative in which someone in academia, Robyn, gets to shadow someone in industry, Victor, an arrangement neither of them look forward to with any degree of relish. Through this construct Lodge is able to view their respective worlds through each other’s eyes. Initially, Robyn is disgusted by capitalism red in tooth and claw and through her well-meaning but misguided interference leads to an industrial dispute. Victor, on the other hand, has a poor view of academics, questioning what they contribute.

During the course of the book they grow to begin to understand each other and see that what seemed initially to be two distinct and unconnected worlds are really both trapped in their particular little bubbles. Victor becomes infatuated with Robyn and they have a fling. Robyn tries to distance herself from Victor but the industrialist’s clever ruse is to become Robyn’s shadow.

Lodge doesn’t seem to miss an opportunity to puncture the pretensions of academics. In a seminar Robyn takes on Tennyson’s Locksley Hall, she uses the line “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change”. Written in 1835, just six years after Stephenson’s Rocket was built, Robyn sees it as Tennyson using the imagery presented by the new-fangled invention to great effect. The pragmatist, Victor, points out that trains do not run on grooves and that Tennyson was, if anything, describing a tram. The image is fatally flawed. It is a delightfully comic moment.

I will not spoil the book save to say that at the end all the characters find some form of inner peace and their financial fortunes are turned upside down. It seemed a little too tidy and the ending appeared a tad rushed, as though Lodge had exhausted the potential of the plot. That said, I found it to be a witty and clever book, a light enough read but with sufficient interest and occasional thought provocation to mark it as a work of some quality.

Book Corner – June 2019 (4)

Small World – David Lodge

Throughout my working life, I have attended many a conference and even spoken at a few. The upside of these events was that they were held in swanky hotels in, generally, attractive places. The downside often was that you met the same old people and talked about the same old stuff. They don’t seem to have been half as exciting as the academic conference circle described by David Lodge in his 1984 novel, a sequel of sorts to Changing Places and the second of his Campus Trilogy.

The book is subtitled an Academic Romance and the key to understanding the more general theme behind what is an entertaining romp is contained in an unlikely piece of literary criticism provided by Cherry Summerbee, a BA check-in assistant; “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.” Another clue is provided by the first object of Persse McGarrigle’s desire, the beautiful Angelica Pabst; “[romance]has not one climax but many, the pleasure of this text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contraction of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless. The greatest and most characteristic romances are often unfinished … Romance is multiple orgasm.”

The book is full of incidents and adventures, which take place around the world at academic conference venues. There is an awful lot of sex and lust, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes thwarted.   As per Summerbee’s analysis, most of the characters are in search of something. Some are familiar from Changing Places reappear, principally Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow and their respective wives, Zapp is divorced but the Swallows are back together in a rather humdrum marriage, but there are many more who flit in and out of the story, their role only becoming clearer as the book progresses.

The protagonist, a new character, the naïve Irish academic and poet, Persse McGarrigle, can be seen as the knight figure in search of his beloved, or two by the end of the book. He is continually frustrated as when he arrives anywhere the object of his pursuit has just left. The leading academics are in search of a sinecure professorship, sponsored by UNESCO.

Mediaeval romances are stock full of allegorical characters and Lodge follows suit. Angelica is the Dark Lady to Persse’s Knight Errant, Miss Maiden is the prophetess and Fulvia Morgana is the morally and sexually corrupt woman.  The plot involves confused or mistaken identities. Persse thinks he is making love to Angelica but in fact it is her twin sister, Lily, and the wise old owl that is Miss Maiden turns out to be the mother of the twins, having been seduced by an academic and forced to abandon the pair on an aeroplane.

The book is very funny and after reading it, you will cross swords with an airport representative allocating seats at your peril. And Lodge takes particular delight in puncturing the pomposity and self-regard of academics. One of the papers presented is entitled The Problem with a Colon and Persse floors a distinguished panel with a simple but very pertinent question. The joys and perils of air travel is another theme that pervades the book and Zapp’s eulogy on the transformational power of the speaker phone and fax machine is both prophetic and anachronistic to the modern reader.

A great book which unlike many of its type does not run out of steam.

Book Corner – May 2019 (2)

Changing Places – David Lodge

I seem to be on a bit of a trilogy kick at the moment. Changing Places, published in 1975, is the first volume of what became known as his Campus Trilogy. It was published in the same year as Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man, both of which helped create a literary sub-genre, campus lit.

The expansion of the university system in the 60s, a grant system which meant that higher education was relatively cost-free for its recipients and the fact that degrees were more valued by employers than they are now meant that more and more students went there. More were familiar with the strange world of academia. And universities at the time became a cynosure for all the prevailing political and societal tensions, hotbeds of student revolutionary movements, sit-ins and changing sexual mores. No wonder the campus proved fertile ground for novelists wanting to put their finger on what was gong on in the late 1960s.

Lodge’s take is a clever and amusing portrayal of student and academic life at the time. Subtitled A Tale of Two Campuses, its Dickensian ring is, presumably, intended to make us think of revolution or, at least, dramatic change. The two campuses around d which the tale is based are the University of Rummidge, somewhere in the industrial Midlands, not too difficult to work out where, and Euphoric State University on the west coast of America. Two academics, the British low-achieving Philip Swallow and the American whizz-kid, Morris Zapp, swap jobs on a six-month exchange programme.

Swallow’s time in Euphoric is one of sexual and political liberation whilst Zapp, who is delaying an inevitable divorce from his wife, galvanises the sleepy British university which is beginning to catch up with the radicalisation of university politics. Perhaps somewhat improbably, the two academics go the whole hog in their immersion into the other’s life, living in each other’s homes, driving their cars and sleeping with their wives. It all adds to the comedic possibilities of the plot line as their infidelities and indiscretions are revealed.

What is astonishing to the modern reader, it seems odd writing that phrase given the book is only forty or years old, but it does show its age, is how lyrical Lodge is on the subject of air travel. For most in the late 60s, even for high-flying academics, air travel was a relatively new experience and, on the whole, certainly in those halcyon pre-9/11 days, pleasant. There was truly a sense of adventure in boarding a plane, a feeling lost for many of us these days who just see planes as another form of transport and pretty unpleasant, uncomfortable and depressing at that. Lodge captures perfectly that early sense of excitement and wonder, together with that frisson of anxiety that still pertains to this day.

Stylistically, the book is quite experimental. It starts out as a conventional third person narrative but then changes pace and style with an epistolary section, followed by a chapter made up exclusively of cuttings from newspapers, manifestos and student literature and then the denouement of the book, where the two couples meet in a New York hotel to sort out their futures, is written as a film script. The ending is messy and open ended, perhaps to be resolved in the other two books that form the trilogy, although Lodge didn’t get around to writing the second book until 1984.

I hadn’t read any Lodge before and enjoyed what was a light and easy read. I’m encouraged to finish off the trilogy.