This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
When David Lodge tried to sell his breakthrough novel Changing Places to an American publisher, it was roundly rejected — 17 times — with one senior editor describing the book as “a very funny and lively example of a genre of English novel that is pure hell to do anything with here”. If this was a “surprise and disappointment” to the writer — who died in January, just shy of his ninetieth birthday — it was an apt enough outcome for a comic novel about cultural differences between Britain and America. For while Lodge evidently couldn’t get arrested across the pond, in this country he was — in a long prime that ran from the 1970s to the 1990s — a kind of literary common currency.
His achievement was to appeal to almost everyone who was interested in contemporary British fiction: he was both bestseller and prizewinner. He did this by blending a technical comic gift with highbrow literary interests: his best-known novels, the “campus trilogy” of Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), drew simultaneously on literary theory and the tradition of the sex farce. (Sex was always on the table — sometimes literally — in a Lodge novel.) He was, to coin a phrase, seriously funny.
He was born in 1935, at the right time to benefit from the swell of interest in fiction, just as he matured as a writer, of the 1980s: bigger advances, more bookshops, more review coverage and a readership not yet atomised into genres. He appealed to fans of both literary fiction and popular novels. It was not always thus. In fact it was only after the muted response to his early novels The Picturegoers (1960) and Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962) — straightforward, non-comic fare despite the latter’s excitable title — that Lodge decided to try to make the reader laugh.
These were funny books but not cynical ones
The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) was the result. It had a compromise title, after Lodge was refused permission to call it The British Museum Has Lost Its Charm (from the Gershwins’ song “A Foggy Day”), but everything else about the novel was a sure-footed triumph. Like many of Lodge’s best works, the novel animates a culture clash: this time between the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception and a healthy young couple’s desire to enjoy recreational sex.
The hero, Adam Appleby, had already found to his two-strong cost (named Clare and Dominic) that “literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around”. He and wife Barbara faithfully practised the church’s approved rhythm method to avoid pregnancy, as a result of which “Clare was born nine months after the wedding. Barbara had then consulted a Catholic doctor who gave her a simple mathematical formula for calculating the Safe Period — so simple that Dominic was born one year after Clare.”
The story is driven by Adam’s fear of a third pregnancy, while he carries out his academic research in the reading room of the British Museum. This research gives Lodge an opportunity to showcase the highbrow element of his work, by incorporating pastiches of ten classic writers into the text — though, when most reviewers failed to notice them, he made sure the next edition flagged them in the blurb.
Slower to understand the appeal of the book than his readers were, Lodge returned to straight, largely autobiographical fiction with his next novel, Out of the Shelter (1970). It took his usual publisher to reject it for Lodge to recognise that his next book had to recapture the “comic invention and stylistic exuberance” of British Museum.
It did — and how. Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work satirised the academia where Lodge worked (and where he remained until 1987, only retiring when his literary career was secure). His Birmingham University became the fictional Rummidge, home to diffident academic Philip Swallow, who undertakes an exchange trip with the dynamic Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University, USA.
The trilogy is driven by bed-hopping antics, mockery of the academic world’s wilder shores (one paper read at a conference in Small World is titled “Textuality as a striptease”) and larger-than-life characters. The campus novel was by then a well-established genre, but Lodge was more straightforwardly funny than his friend Malcolm Bradbury and more ambitious than Kingsley Amis.
The ambition came out in the textual jiggery-pokery he offered: Changing Places uses diverse formats to tell its story, including a screenplay; Small World adopts the structures and themes of medieval literature (“The idea,” said Lodge, “was to superimpose a satirical comedy of modern academic manners on a pattern of mythic motifs and romantic archetypes”); and Nice Work, the best of the trilogy, is a reworking of the Victorian industrial novel — represented in the text by reference to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South — in Thatcher’s Britain.
Come for the jokes, stay for the postmodern play. These were funny books but not cynical ones, which optimism may help explain their popularity as Lodge became a sort of literary universal solvent: appealing to fans of both Tom Sharpe and Iris Murdoch. The trilogy was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Thus began Lodge’s purple patch, his imperial phase. The trilogy was followed by novels that — now Lodge was no longer a literary professor — looked further afield than academia. Paradise News (1991) exhibited his confidence in his abilities: an assured combination of Brits-abroad comedy and knotty investigations into theology and deconstructionism. Therapy (1995) gave us a fat sitcom writer so desperate to solve his multiple crises, including what doctors call “internal derangement of the knee” (“IDK — I don’t know”, is our man’s interpretation) that he goes into therapy, and when he reflects that “having to think hard is exciting”, it might be a manifesto for Lodge’s purpose. It is surely the only novel in existence which combines sex comedy with major structural twists and a deep understanding of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.
Yet as the millennium approached, and then turned, something was changing — both in Lodge’s writing and in the literary culture. On the latter, Lodge perhaps should have seen the warning signs during his painful experience of chairing the judges for the Booker Prize in 1989. Lodge, along with the other male judges, wanted Martin Amis’s novel London Fields to be shortlisted, but the two female judges disagreed on the basis that the book was, inter alia, “irredeemably sexist”. Lodge recalled ruefully that one of those judges had said to him in a phone call that one of her criteria for a good novel should be that “it must be ideologically correct”.
This was a minority view, perhaps, but it was increasingly the case that an author could not assume that readers would read their prose to understand that a misbehaving character was not the author’s surrogate or that layers of irony may need to be penetrated to reach the core of the book.
Lodge changed, but we changed too
When Small World was chosen as a Guardian Book Club book in 2012, Lodge was accused by a reader of treating female characters badly (because his male characters did), and rightly disputed this: the women “run rings around the male characters”, he pointed out. (One scene has two lotharios meeting in a hotel bedroom, each thinking they’re on an assignation with a female colleague, when in reality she has set them both up.)
So times were changing, but Lodge was changing too. We recall that he had to be told comedy was his forte early in his career, and following Lodge’s death, the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote that “fundamentally he was a very serious person — to the occasional surprise of those who expect comic writers to turn up wearing a red nose and a revolving bow tie”. Later in his career he returned to straight fiction, with Author, Author (2004, about Henry James) and A Man of Parts (2011, about H.G. Wells).
Author, Author suffered a famous setback: it appeared six months after Colm Tóibín’s own novel about Henry James, The Master. And although Lodge’s version was lively and impeccably researched, there was a plodding, flat-footed quality to it which made the novel suffer in comparison to Tóibín’s more rarefied work. And readers missed the comedy.
Lodge suffered great anguish with the relative failure of Author, Author. He had always been highly attentive to the responses to his work (his 1990 novella Home Truths quotes Virginia Woolf: “the worst thing about being a writer is being so dependent on praise”), writing to newspapers to highlight inaccuracies and even on one occasion ringing round literary editors to see if they’d received a copy of his new novel.
Such worries are all detailed — detailed being the word — in his three volumes of autobiography, which run to an astonishing 1,100 pages. There, no highlight is too high to be brought down to earth (with one prize, “I spent the money on a dishwasher”).
So Lodge changed, but we changed too, and he moved away from the centre of the literary consciousness to the fringes. But his books are still there to delight us. And among all the reviews he meticulously noted, there was one piece of praise he cherished until the end. His father — who had written unpublished stories of his own — read his son’s novels but had rarely spoken much about them. When Lodge published Changing Places his father sent a note. “It’s great.” he told his son. “Just how I would have liked to write if I had been a writer.”
