Small World & Nice Work - David Lodge

I decided to do a two-in-one post on these two as they are the last two books in David Lodge's "campus trilogy" the first of which, Changing Places, I read earlier this month. I've been reading these books alongside what is turning into a R.I.P. themed month and they have certainly provided me with light relief.

First up, we have Small World which is set ten years after the events of Changing Places and it touches on the lives of several of the characters featured in that earlier book. They are now living a high old life indeed:

"Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air, and on the make, in David Lodge's satirical 'Small World'. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air."

This book is more obviously poking fun at the characters, and the availability of funding, than I noticed in Changing Places and it reads almost like a farce. This is not to imply that the books is in any way juvenile in content as at times it's really quite clear how clever Lodge is as he swaps from character to character and highlights both their character flaws and their range of intellect. At the centre of the book is Persse McGarrigle's devoted pursuit of the elusive Angelica Pabst whom he tracks around the world from conference to conference at enormous cost to his financial and emotional well being which allows us to attend most of the conferences on offer as well as to bump into a range of new and old characters. Good fun if not as politically biting as the first one I read.

Nice Work is the last in the trilogy (although it would also work well as a stand-alone novel) and in it we start to see the impact of the huge funding cuts that hit British Universities in the 80s. Long gone are the world-wide conference jaunts from Small World! The story focuses on Rummidge University, where Professor Swallow is now a faculty Dean. We follow Dr Robyn Penrose, who has secured a temporary lectureship in the English department, as she participates in a work shadow exchange project following around Vic Wilcox who is the MD of a local engineering firm. A clash of ideology naturally occurs as Robyn empathises with the "plight of the worker" and Vic questions the business practices that underpin University life.

As I have now come to expect, this novel was both amusing and thought provoking and I am sure that I'll be reading more of David Lodge's books in the future. Such a shame I missed him speak recently. :(

I'm now going to share a random Internet discovery since my last post that involved David Lodge. The Guardian featured him in their Writers Rooms series and I want his study. Look at those lovely shelves full of books with a comfy chair in the perfect spot. So jealous.

Changing Places - David Lodge

This was one of my charity shop bargains from last week and at 50p it was a snip. I got hold of four of David Lodge's books and am trying to read as many as possible before I see him in action, as it were, at the UEA LitFest next week.*

Changing Places is the first in a trilogy of campus novels (the other two being Small World and Nice Work which were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and from the blurb:

"When Phillip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sun-drenched Euphoric State University and rain-kissed University of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows..."

David Lodge is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to write full-time. He was Harkness Fellow in the United States (1964-5), Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1969) and Henfield Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia (1977). All of this, one suspects, makes him superbly qualified to write in a very knowledgeable and, one suspects, horribly accurate manner about University politics. The introduction to the second book in this series, Small World, explains that Rummidge University is Birmingham and that Euphoric is Berkley.

This book is set in 1969 and whilst the political landscape we live in has changed since then, Lodge uses observational comedy to expertly explore more serious subjects, such as feminism and consumerism, and to demonstrate how society at that time was undergoing a change as the students at both Universities become more politically aware.

I really should mention the narrative devices David Lodge used to tell the story - he takes us from traditional novel format to extracts from newspapers to an exchange of letters between several parties then returned us to a novel and finished with a screenplay. All of which were expertly executed. I'm already looking forward to reading the other books in the trilogy!

*By the time I finished this post, it was after he'd participated in the UEA LitFest and I didn't get around to seeing David Lodge speak last week. I blame work and will try harder!