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 book published four or more years ago.

                  DEFINITIVE VERDICT ON THE NOVELS OF DAVID LODGE

 

Over the last four postings, your patience has been tested by my using this “Something Old “ section to talk about the work of David Lodge (born 1935). First there was a posting on his autobiographies Quite a Good Time to be Born and Writer’s Luck. Then for three postings I marched you through all fifteen of his novels, to wit  All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part One and All YouNeed to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part Two and  All YouNeed to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part Three. Last posting I concluded by saying that I would present “the definitive, authoritative and indisputable judgment on the works of David Lodge.”

To begin with the punchline, I think David Lodge began as a serious novelist with a sideline in humour, dealing interestingly with issues that were topical at the time he was writing, and deploying real wit. But gradually he began to repeat himself and fell into a predictable and formulaic style of comedy until finally he gave up on real novels and turned to writing fictionalised biographies disguised as novels. What at first seemed genuinely witty in the end seemed easy facetiousness.

David Lodge is always readable. In every one of his novels there are at least sparks of real wit and moments of legitimate and justifiable satire. But the flippant elements and contrived comedy do stop many of his later novels dead. Even as he was still producing novels, he was beginning to be a back number.

That, dear reader, is my overview of David Lodge. But I do have to show you some proof, don’t I?

 

One of his earliest novels Ginger You’re Barmy is basically an old-style protest novel, almost of the “angry young man” school, serious in intent even if having some incidental drama and comedy added. The difficulty now is that it protests against something (compulsory “national service” in the British armed forces) that is long gone.

The first three novels Lodge wrote that directly address Catholicism could also be regarded as serious work, even if one of them has much farce. The Picturegoers gives an accurate and detailed picture of Catholicism in England as it was before the Vatican Council of the 1960s. The British Museum is Falling Down is essentially a protest novel against the Vatican’s ban on artificial contraception, but presented as farce and with (deadeningly) arch pastiches of canonical writing, we being expected to get all the clever literary allusions Lodge plants. The humour now appears sophomoric. How Far Can You Go has some real weight as it follows the changing attitudes of English Catholics from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, again accurately. Interestingly though, its many challenges to Catholic teaching are counterpointed by a subtle nostalgia for the church as it used to be. Lodge implies there is always a hunger for some sort of ritual and worship – almost like “the God-sized hole in human consciousness” – and this concept re-surfaces much later in his novel Paradise News where tourism becomes a substitute for religion (just as movie-going does in The Picturegoers).

Out of the Shelter, Lodge’s fictionalised version of his own adolescent experience in Germany, has some wish-fulfilment elements, but is generally still in the mode of realism. It also reveals the beginning of Lodge’s love-hate attitude towards American pop culture and American affluence; but more often, as in two of  his “campus” novels Changing Places and Small World, it comes across as a thin carapace of satire trying to hide a broad streak of envy. Brit author from Birmingham really wants to revel in the wealthy, flashy, overfed American Way of Life, but feels obliged to take pokes at it.

 

And regrettably, too, it is in his “campus” novels that Lodge becomes more and more dependent on predictable sex farce as a sort of humour, subtle as Benny Hill or a Carry On movie. Changing Places has Brit prof. switching places with American prof. Some of the Brit’s experiences in America are funny enough as are some of the American’s experiences in Britain, but when the sex-farce element enters, it removes all of the credibility that is needed even for good comedy. The same could be said of Small World. Changing Places deals with the difference between teaching humanities in Britain amd teaching humanities in America; and Small World deals with the phenomenon of international academic conferences which are junkets rather than fruitful exchanges of ideas. But as in Ginger You’re Barmy and The British Museum is Falling Down,  these are concepts that are no longer topical. The nature of British and American universities has changed since Lodge was writing his “campus” novels in the 1970s and 1980s, and the interactions of staff and students in his novels now seem quaint in comparison with the age of de-platforming, cancel culture and challenges to the teaching of the classical humanities.

To Lodge’s credit, he does vary the format in what I think are his two best campus-set novels, Nice Work and Thinks.  Nice Work brings in the element of social class more than most of Lodge’s novels do, with its tale of an upper-middle-class academic learning more about life from a working-class-bred industrialist, and the industrialist learning more about life from the academic. The campus is only part of the story and does not dominate. Thinks too is not entirely focused on the campus, built around the concept of communication and how difficult it can be for one human being to communicate with another, and bandying about many ideas related to consciousness, linguistics, semantics and semiotics. At least these two novels have less of the tiresome and repetitive sex-farce of his other “campus” novels although, as always, Lodge thinks a bonk makes a happy ending.

Speaking of bonking, Therapy is Lodge’s most unhinged foray into this territory. Middle-aged man has lost his libido and wants to get it back. Various styles of therapy ensue, with results that I assume are meant to be hilarious. More-of-the-same Lodge-ism, but at least an admission that age was catching up. The sentimental ending of Therapy (protagonist finds bliss with long-lost childhood sweetheart) is tosh of the first water. But are we supposed to forgive such tosh because it is, after all, comedy?

 

By now, entering the 2000s, we find the degeneration of Lodge as novelist. The brief novella Home Truths has its funny moments but is basically a botched playscript. Deaf Sentence, inspired by Lodge’s own loss of hearing, is muddled. It begins as sex farce in the Lodge fashion, but then turns awkwardly into a meditation on age, deafness and death, as if Lodge is trying to claw back seriousness. The parts don’t fit together. The novels published before and after Deaf Sentence are both fictionalised biographies of literary figures, with an emphasis on their sex lives. Author, Author! concerns Henry James and his lack of a sex life; and A Man of Parts concerns H.G.Wells and his over-active sex life. They are interesting for their historical detail, and the latter sent me scuttling off to read or re-read some of the works of H.G.Wells. But all the time I thought that we would be better off reading real biographies, especially as, in Author, Author!, Lodge himself finally gives up and in the last pages of the book wraps things up with a straightforward account of Henry James, admitting, in effect, that he has not really been able to catch the man in fiction.

As Lodge himself states in his autobiographies, by this stage his novels were ceasing to sell well in Britain although they continued to have a market in France. Earlier he had twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize, without winning in either case. Now his days as a bestseller were coming to an end.

Although his two volumes of autobiography (especially the second one, Writer’s Luck) become increasingly dull, Lodge himself appears to be a decent and humane person, good-humoured and only very rarely saying negative things about other academics or writers. He enjoys life. I can’t forebear comparing him with a New Zealand academic-novelist whose over-long, self-praising three volumes of autobiography brim with attacks on people who refuse to recognise his genius or share his views.

Lodge is also a very erudite man. His knowledge of literary theory is wide, and his discussions of modes of narration, modernism, post-modernism and literary theory are presented lucidly in his non-fiction works. But I think this very erudition leads him down some false paths when it comes to writing novels. Too often, he is tempted to show his cleverness by inserting irrelevant academic and literary jokes, like the sophomoric pastiches of canonical writers in The British Museum is Falling Down and the redundant conceit of a medieval “romance” structuring Small World.

Perhaps my views on Lodge’s novels are slightly jaded. Remember, I read all fifteen of his novels one after the other, to the point where the same type of comedy and the same literary embellishments became predictable. Even the works of Bill Shakespeare would bore us if we read them all in sequence like this. I’d be a cad and a bounder if I didn’t admit to enjoying some of Lodge’s novels. But from irrefutable empirical evidence, I know how forgettable they are. I read Lodge’s Therapy in my recent Lodge marathon as something I had never read before. Only later, when I happened to be flipping through my scrapbooks, did I discover that I had not only read Therapy when it first came out, but had also written a newspaper review of it. I had completely forgotten it.

So how to sum up David Lodge’s novels. He is (or rather was) an entertaining lightweight with some real wit but often dealing with matters that now show their age.