David Lodge was already a lauded novelist in 1987, when I arrived at the unassuming doors of Foster Court on Malet Place to study English literature and language at University College London. Lodge had taken the same course there himself more than 30 years before, got a first and went on to do a master’s there, too. His name was spoken with pride in hushed, reverent tones – and this was a department that would happily dismiss anything published after 1850 as hopelessly modern. I dutifully bought Changing Places to see what the fuss was about.
The campus novel was a serious literary genre then – Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Jacobson were prominent names and their novels spoke to me at the time, because I was navigating that scary world myself – but within a single chapter I saw immediately that Lodge’s writing had an extra something: he was properly funny. Not just subtly clever or wryly satirical. Not somewhat amusing if you’ve read the entire works of John Milton and are up to speed on hot trends in lit crit, no – they were bright, lively and laugh-out-loud hilarious, with as many sex and toilet jokes as literary references. His characters were flawed in a real way and became entangled in farcical situations that were completely believable. I was hooked, and explored his backlist like a true fan – or like a student of English who should really have been reading the Romantics.
Lodge’s work has a strong autobiographical thread. Ginger, You’re Barmy was inspired by his time in the national service. How Far Can You Go? and The British Museum is Falling Down both explored contemporary Catholic family life in the 1950s and 60s and was so evocative of the time that Lodge is still discussed as a Catholic as well as a campus novelist. None of those stories had any personal relevance to me in the late 1980s, but they were so punchy, funny and engaging I enjoyed them nonetheless.
Still, it was his campus novels that captured my heart. His trilogy Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) are now tributes to the buoyant, optimistic world of well-respected and funded postwar academia. Philip Swallow, the hapless academic who struggles to get by at home and in his job at Rummidge University (a phonetic approximation of Birmingham University where Lodge worked when he wrote them) sees his career reflect changing times. Over 15 years, academia goes from a place of optimism, innovation and possibility, to a place where students barely get by on their grants, while their professors long for days gone by when the international lecture circuit could fund a lifestyle of global travel.
Today, Lodge’s campus novels feel peculiar to the late 20th century, a time when working and lower middle-class students accessed university for the first time, which in turn led to a new generation of academics from unconventional backgrounds. Like Lodge, the best campus novelists are outsiders looking in at a once rarefied world, and Lodge wrote about it with an affectionate, curious, critical and cheeky eye.
It’s this humour that makes his writing so enduringly accessible, whether you recognise the world of crusty, repressed academics or if you’ve never been near an iambic pentameter or a copy of Ulysses in your life. He certainly answers a definitive “yes” to the question “can a comic novel also be literary?”
Lodge’s books animated academia for me. He turned it into something you can and should laugh at, and that made it a less scary place – it’s why I still treasure my collection of orange and white Penguin paperbacks to this day. And when I came to write a campus novel myself, The Examiner, it was Lodge’s humour and comic timing that served as inspiration.
