David Lodge, one of the foremost novelists and critics writing in Britain today and popular with generations of readers, will be delivering a public reading in Malta on Wednesday. Ivan Callus considers the enduring appeal of his work in fiction and criticism.
People smile with genuine affection and pleasure when they recall David Lodge’s work.
It takes a very special body of work to produce that reaction, for while it is not difficult to point to contemporary fiction that is profound, it is a little harder to find novels which also charm and disarm us as we recognise in them both ourselves and the behaviour of people around us.
We can appreciate this more easily if we reflect on Lodge’s contribution to the rise of the campus novel, a genre which, together with Malcolm Bradbury, he brought to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.
In novels like Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) or Nice Work (1988), or in later texts like Thinks… (2001) or Deaf Sentence (2008), Lodge sets the action in universities and satirises – sometimes gently and sometimes with farce and force that are a little more pointed – the foibles of academics (and students) and the faults they are particularly prone to.
These are novels informed by the English tradition of the comedy of manners. Comedy and wit mingle with sharp yet empathetic observation of human behaviour as it tends to play itself out in specific contexts.
In the process, something universal is discovered in human nature and dramatised. We may wince at the discovery, but we are also made to smile or even guffaw by the dramatisation.
The secret, I think, is not so much in the deftness of the observation or even in the undoubted comic genius which Lodge very clearly commands. Other writers have elements of that.
What makes Lodge unique, rather, is his generosity. This may be a strange thing to point out in a satirist, but the simple truth is that Lodge is generous even when he is being punitive.
It is striking that even when he is at his sharpest, he is never caustic. He has an empathetic eye and turn of phrase even for his most unspeakable characters.
It is a quality that the greatest Victorian writers had, when they were presenting entire micro-societies to our view and making us shrink, smile, frown, fume, and marvel at human motivation: in all that, they are never misanthropic but, ultimately, indulgent.
We come away from the prospect of human shabbiness feeling uplifted and redeemed. It takes a special generosity of perception and vision to deliver that.
This same quality is evident in Lodge’s criticism. We are not surprised that his main readings are of Victorian and Modernist fiction.
He has, of course, written novels about Henry James and H. G. Wells (he will be reading from the latter, The Man of Parts, published this year, at Evenings on Campus), and we are prompted by that to realise that what drives Lodge’s critical inquiry is the way in which human consciousness – the passage of thoughts as they fall half-formed on the registering mind – is transcribed into the language and the mechanics of fiction.
From that, human actions can be observed a little more surgically, though always through the poetries of fiction. Time and again, in texts like The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), Modes of Modern Writing (1977), The Art of Fiction (1992) and Consciousness and the Novel (2002), he returns to that confluence between consciousness, motivation, action and the rhetoric of narrative.
In all that, his generosity as a critic is clear from the lucidity of his explanations. He reads closely, he demonstrates patiently and with ample evidence, and he brings to bear one other special quality that is uniquely his. It is that he combines the urbane erudition of the best traditions of English criticism with full awareness and knowledge of the conceptual architectures of literary theory.
He has been deservedly praised for making formidable ideas accessible to students without compromising rigour or sophistication.
In Lodge, then, we are reading some of the very best work that postwar English fiction and criticism offer us. And like all great writers, he makes us realise that as we are reading him we find the histories and motivations of all our reading trajectories somehow reflected there.
David Lodge will be delivering a public reading at Atriju Vassalli at the University on Wednesday at 9 p.m., as part of Evenings on Campus.
Lodge’s visit to Malta comes about through the generous support of the British Council, Evenings on Campus and the Department of English.
Ivan Callus is head of the Department of English at University.