Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

ALL YOU NEED KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS OF DAVID LODGE – PART TWO

 

This is the second in a three-part series covering all the novels of David Lodge, following on from All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part One, which appeared in the last posting.

 

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How Far Can You Go? (first published 1980) was marketed in America under the title Souls and Bodies. It was for many years David Lodge’s best-selling novel. In some respects it is a protest novel – but only in some respects. How Far CanYou Go? is what I would call a “panoramic” work, cutting between a large cast of characters and told in the omniscient third-person. It concerns a group of English Catholics, following them for about 25 years years from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. In the process it gives an account of how the Catholic church changed radically in those years. In 1951, the nine major named characters are university students who attend (Latin-language) mass regularly, believe in the concepts of Hell and possible damnation, receive communion, go to confession and especially take seriously the church’s teaching on chastity, sexual morality and the sanctity of marriage. Most (but not all) of them look forward to marrying and raising families. To give you their names once and once only, they are glamorous and pious Angela, after whom many boys pant; hearty and lusty Polly; plain and sour Ruth; Miles who has converted from Protestantism and takes liturgy very seriously; Michael who is sexually-obsessed and aches for consummation; Dennis who has an awful crush on Angela; Adrian who can’t quite bring himself to admit he is homosexual; plain, commonsense Edward; and the highly-neurotic Irish girl Violet. All are staunch practising Catholics. Their student group is shepherded by Fr. Austin Brierly.

But the 1960s come along, and everything changes. First there is the Vatican Council, which modernises the liturgy, calls into doubt many long-observed practices and allows more radical theologians to redefine central beliefs. And at the same time in society at large there is the so-called “sexual revolution”, fuelled by easily-available contraception. In 1968, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, the pope reaffirms the church’s ban on artificial birth-control. So this is the “protest” element of the novel. Through the stories of his main characters, Lodge chronicles the anxieties of Catholics who attempt to play by the church’s official rules, using the “natural” rhythm method of birth control but having children anyway. Lodge is calling out the  church’s ruling and suggesting what psychological and physical harm it did to many people. This, I surmise, may be what made this novel a bestseller, especially among Catholics. In the character of Fr. Austin Brierly we also see the turn to heterodox forms of worship and a certain degree of gimmickry in new liturgies.

Lodge’s style might possibly be called postmodern. The omniscient narrator sometimes butts in to explain how he is constructing this novel. In Chapter 3, Lodge explicitly refers to his own earlier novel The British Museum is Falling Down. In Chapter 4 he cheerfully breaks off his narrative to give a general journalistic overview of Catholic reaction to Humanae Vitae, and then apologises to readers for having held up the story. I have to assume that he has based some of his characters on people he knew, and on his own experience. One main character, for example, has a Down’s Sydrome child, as do Lodge and his wife.

Yet there is an odd undercurrent to this novel. The title How Far Can You Go? is the question Catholic schoolboys once used to tease priests, when they were discussing the appropriate courting of the opposite sex. But, as some of his characters have affairs, turn adulterous and embrace fashionable theologies, or – in the case of a nun – can’t find certainty when they embrace modish causes, Lodge implies that it is possible to go too far in the post-Vatican II church. It is quite obvious, for example, that Lodge finds some new forms of liturgy fatuous, and the assumptions of some “progressive” Catholics either naïve or self-serving. Some of the styles they embraced now seem more ludicrous – and more irrelevant – than the old pre-Vatican II church, such as the short-lived “Charismatic Renewal”. In fact, under all their adjustment to new ways, the novel’s main characters have an underlying sense of loss and a desire for certainties that have been discarded. Lodge’s protest is real, but I do sense a certain nostalgia for the church as it was, for all its imperfections.

 

 

Small World (first published in 1984), sometimes subtitled “An Academic Romance”, was the second of Lodge’s “campus novels” following on from Changing Places. It was shortlisted for (but did not win) the Booker Prize. While Changing Places focuses on the difference between American and British universities, Small World deals with the phenomenon of international academic conferences. The title clearly has a double meaning. It’s a small world when academics can hop on international flights and be in exotic venues in a matter of hours. But the conferences themselves are usually a “small world” of the same academics competing for awards or tenure or publication or prestige; sharing gossip; trying to undermine one another; arguing over their pet theories and, of course, holidaying at their universities’ expense and having extrcurricular sexual encounters. Longer than most of Lodge’s novels, Small World has a large cast of characters, some of whom (such as Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp) reappear from Changing Places. Much of it plays as broad farce.

As the subject is conferences on language and literature, Lodge once again enjoys satirising various schools of literary criticism. The (hypocritically rich and sex-addicted) Italian Marxist, Fulvia Morgana, interprets all literature as evidence of the class-war. The haughty, aged Oxbridge critic Rudyard Parkinson wants to stick with traditional modes of criticism and resents all this new-fangled French “literary theory” nonsense. Meanwhile the younger hotshots who want to get ahead up are to their necks in structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstructionism. They take their lead from older, cannier practitioners in these intellectual games such as the dogmatic German Siegfried von Turpitz and the porn-watching American post-structuralist Arthur Kingfisher. Meanwhile the under-prepared Aussie lecturer Rodney Wainwright strains and agonises over writing a paper for a conference which he has been lucky enough to be invited to. And then there is the disconsolate technocrat (who is never invited to conferences) Robin Dempsey, who believes that he will solve all questions about literature by using computers to analyse the frequency of key words in any writer’s work. Much of this is straightforward piss-taking interlarded with the fortunes of Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow in both publishing and sexual activity. Of course arch literary jokes come thick and fast.

But Lodge wants Small World to be more than a romp. His central thread of plot has the naïve young Irish academic Persse McGarrigle chasing from conference to conference his ideal woman Angelica, and never quite finding her. Note that subtitle, “An Academic Romance”, the word “romance” being used to designate Medieval and Renaissance romances which were episodic tales of quests to find some ideal (the Holy Grail or the perfect lover). So on come references to Arthurian romance and Edmund Spenser. Note the names of characters. The seductive sex-addict Fulvia Morgana is really the Arthurian temptress Morgan le Fay. Arthur Kingfisher, doyen of post-structuralists, is the Fisher King. The chaste and virginal Persse  McGarrigle is Percival (or Parsifal), the pure knight in quest of the Grail. Etcetera, etcetera, et-bloody-cetera.  Like the other literary jokes this can be very arch, especially in the denouement where all ends are tied up neatly in a fantastical, mythical way that jars with the novel’s modern milieu and frequent realism… but then the mythical stuff, via an ancient spinster scholar called (archly) Sybil Maiden, does allow Lodge to link his “romance” with T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land.

You can see from the above that I found Small World both amusing and irritating. In his autobiography, Lodge says that many were annoyed by this novel’s publication at a time when subsidies for British universities were being cut back. Some reviewers said Small World presented the false image of academic conferences as no more than time-wasting junkets. More objectionable to me, though, were the predictable slapstick parts, usually related to rough sex (Morris Zapp being caught at a most inappropriate moment in s-and-m handcuffs by the rapacious Fulvia Morgana; a publisher shagging his secretary is a basement where boxes collapse on him etc. etc.). They come across as outtakes from a bad Carry On movie. And of course when Persse  McGarrigle does eventually catch up with Angelica, his Holy Grail proves to be one night of rutting, after which the two of them go their separate ways. Not much of an outcome for a Quest, really, is it? But then perhaps Lodge was signalling that the search for real enlightenment at academic literary conferences is also a quest bound for bathetic failure.

 

Nice Work (published in 1988) was another of David Lodge’s “campus novels”. Like Small World is was shortlisted for (but did not win) the Booker Prize, but for what little it’s worth, it did win the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. How ‘bout that? Philip Swallow (now head of Rummidge – i.e. Birmingham – University English Department) is a minor character in the background of the story. Interesting to note that Swallow is now afflicted with encroaching deafness, as Lodge himself later went deaf and he might have been drawing on personal experience. Morris Zapp also re-appears very late in the novel as a sort of deus ex machina.

The plot of Nice Work bears some resemblance to Changing Places, essentially concerning two characters who get to know each other’s environment. In her early 30s, Robyn Penrose is a junior lecturer in Rummidge Univerity’s Eng. Lit. Dept. She is an advocate of deconstructionism, literary theory, a little Marxism and a lot of feminism. The book she is working on concerns all those “State of England” Industrial novels that were written in the nineteenth century – Shirley, North and South, Mary Barton, Sibyl, Hard Times, Alton Locke etc. – which decried the growing gap between the middle classes and industrial workers. Ironically though, for all her theory, Robyn know very little about how industry works in the present day.

But she is assigned to a scheme intended to bring academe and industry closer together. She will “shadow” (i.e. follow that daily activities of) an industrialist who will later “shadow” her in her academic round. She is paired with no-nonsense Vic Wilcox, managing director of an engineering firm, in his forties, married and with a family of three fractious teenagers and young adults. Self-righteously Robyn sets out to “improve” the working conditions of the engineering firm while clearly not knowing how it operates or what sort of men it employs. At first Vic Wilcox resents and despises her but gradually, through their bickering, the industrialist and the academic are drawn together in a sort of sparring Beatrice-and-Benedick relationship. Yes, it does involve some sex (David Lodge can’t resist it), but does not involve love, as Robyn sticks to her feminist dogma that she is an autonomous being. She rebuffs Vic’s romantic advances. Of course Vic, later placed in the academic environment, learns at least some things about the study of literature and there is much jolly by-play with the complexities of literary theory. The novel’s “happy ending” is ridiculous  - but then this is supposed to be a comedy and Lodge would probably argue that he is consciously parodying the “happy endings” that tied up so many otherwise-serious Victorian novels, when fate stepped in to solve what were really insoluble problems.

Nice Work is very obviously set in the reign of Margaret Thatcher, with Robyn’s brother Basil and then Robyn’s erstwhile lover Charles latching on to the joys of making lotsa money on the currency market. Crass materialism reigns.  There is also the fact that universities are being defunded, there are cutbacks and many members of Rummidge University’s English Department are fearing for their jobs. This, too, was a feature of Thatcherism. Perhaps Lodge was consciously righting the false image he had presented in Small World of academe as one endless conference-attending junket. There is also, throughout the novel, the huge irony that the Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist Robyn comes from a very comfortable middle-class background and has never known any other sort of life. She never understands that her zeal to “improve” the industrial workers is really a exercise in embourgeoisement. She wants them to be like her. Vic, of working-class background, is not presented as a positive opposite to her – he has his faults – but his experience of industry has taught him more than Robyn’s theory has,

Despite its lame ending, Nice Work has a clearer focus than either Changing Places or Small World. I think it is the best of Lodge’s “campus novels”.

 

 

In many ways, Paradise News (published 1991) is a reversion to Lodge’s very first novel The Picturegoers. In The Picturegoers, Lodge suggested that movie-going was a substitute for religion, offering new images to worship. Over thirty years later, in Paradise News, he suggests that tourism (and sex) are the new religions. In Paradise News, a pop anthopologist called Sheldrake articulates this thesis specifically (even if Lodge gently pokes fun at him for his modishness). Tourists taken in jumbo jets to exotic places are the new pilgrims. Tourist traps to which the tour guides take them are the new shrines. Holiday snaps and home-movies are the relics taken home to authenticate that one has been to the exotic place. And, of course, tourist advertising tells tourists that their destination will be very “paradise”.

The setting is Hawaii, where everything is hyperbolically described as Paradise.

The protagonist is 44-year-old Bernard Walsh, an Englishman of Irish descent from Lodge’s Rummidge (i.e. Birmingham). He comes to Hawaii on a farewell visit to his aged Aunt Ursula, who is cancer-ridden and has a short time to live. Bernard is an ex-priest who lectures in theology but is now deeply agnostic and has cast aside any  religious belief. Ironically, Aunt Ursula was long ago expelled from her Irish Catholic family for marrying a divorced American who has now deserted her; but in her old age, she has returned fervently to the Catholic faith. In terms of religion, Bernard and Ursula have changed places. There is much rich comedy in this story, especially related to Bernard’s outspoken and cantankerous old Irish father (Ursula’s brother) whom he’s brought along with him.

On the matter of tourism, Lodge chroncles the real tackiness and commercialised bad taste behind the over-hyped attractions of Hawaii, and he has a supporting cast of (English) tourists who represent different “types” – the man who always complains; the kids who are bored; the young married couple who can’t enjoy the holiday because they’ve fallen out; the man obsessed with recording everything in home movies; the two young women who are looking for Mr Right. They reveal themselves in the type of postcards and letters they send home.

But the real theme is healing. As soon as Yolande, an (available, almost divorced) American woman, walks into the story and strikes up a friendship with Bernard, you know exactly where Paradise News is going. Ex-priest Bernard longs for a woman and his one chance to have one had gone nowhere. Now there is Yolande, sympathetic, sexually experienced and ready to tutor him. So for Bernard part of the happy ending is ecstatic sex and companionship as (yawn) it is in a number of Lodge’s novels. The other healing comes from the reconciliation of Ursula and Bernard’s Dad, and from Bernard’s renewed understanding of the value of religious ritual as consolation, even if he remains firmly a non-believer. There’s also the too-neat sudden appearance of a whacking great legacy to cure everybody’s woes. Lodge really does strain to make plausible happy endings (see review of his Therapy below).

A number of things weight this novel down. It is rather awkward when, exactly half-way through, Bernard gives a long first-person account of his formation as a priest and then his disillusionment with his role. And in the very last chapter there’s a long sequence where Bernard explains his beliefs to his students; and then Yolande sends a long letter chronicling the beauty of Aunt Ursula’s religious funeral. The exposition here is too explicit and obvious, though it does reveal Lodge’s own ambiguity – he is an agnostic who nevertheless has some nostalgic affection for the church he put behind him. And, be it movies, tourism or sex, Lodge does suggest that some sort of religious yearning beyond oneself is an essential and enduring part of the human character. “The God-like hole in our consciousness” etc.

 

 

Lodge’s Therapy (first published in 1995) was hailed by some reviewers as a comic masterpiece and does have some very funny set-pieces – but somehow (for this reader at least) it goes badly off the boil before it ends, perhaps because it trundles on longer than most Lodge novels do. This is the novel in which Lodge tackles late middle-age and the awful looming fact of physical decline. Lodge was 60 when the novel was published and his protagonist is about the same age.

58-year-old Laurence Passmore – generally known as Tubby – is a successful and affluent scriptwriter for a TV sitcom; but all the savour is going out of his life. He can still get an erection but he finds it impossible to have an orgasm when he makes love to his wife Sally. Even more worrying, he has a persistent pain in his knee which conventional medicine cannot cure. So Tubby worries and wonders and becomes a ripe neurotic as he looks for cures – psychotherapy of course, but also acupuncture, aromatherapy and a quest for satisfying sex. This takes him on a priapically-driven journey, usually leading to comic disaster. He suspects his wife of having a lover (comic disaster in London). He tries to turn a platonic friend into his mistress (comic disaster in awful holiday in Tenerife). He fails to get it on with a Hollywood bimbo whose passes he turned down years before (comic disaster in LA). Then he discovers the works of Kierkegaard, with whom he becomes obsessed. He believes studying Kierkegaard’s existentialism is giving him an accurate account of his own neuroses and will help him mend his marriage. Whereupon his wife Sally walks out on him.

Up to this point the novel is picaresque fun-and-tumbles and frequently a sharp satire on modish remedies for psychological problems. But as so often, Lodge plays some neat post-modern games. The story is told in the first-person by Tubby Passmore in the form of his diary entries over a number of months, and the narrator’s pr
ofession as scriptwriter makes him (like Lodge) conscious of how he is using language. Every so often, he will stop his narrative to look up the meaning and origin of a word he has just used, questioning the validity of what he has just written. The novel gives us a section of other characters’ observations on Tubby, ostensibly displaying an “objective” view of his life and obsessions. These voices often sound forced and artificial… which proves to be the case as they all turn out to be Tubby’s inventions of what other people are thinking about him. We can never really trust the narrator of a novel, can we?

Weakest, I think, is the way the novel resolves itself. I won’t go into the details, but it involves Tubby becoming deeply nostalgic about his first, innocent teenage crush on a girl forty years previously (and incidentally allowing Lodge once again to work in some details of his own childhood near London). In effect he tries to “go home again” and reconstruct that first love. How this thread of plot works out is upbeat – which is only fair in a novel that sets out to be comic – but also improbable and, as a denouement, rather glib. I really can’t imagine a person as self-obssessed  as Tubby ever being “cured” in the way Lodge allows him to be. Bits of travelogue also overwhelm the last sections of the novel.

Let’s say its an almost successful comic novel.