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David Lodge |
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David Lodge was born in London in 1935. He was educated at University College London, where he took his BA degree in 1955 and his MA in 1959. In between he did National Service in the British Army. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where he taught in the English Department from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded a CBE for services to literature and is also a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
David Lodge's novels include The Picturegoers (1960); Ginger, You're Barmy (1962); The British Museum is Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded both the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go?, which was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980; Small World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984; Nice Work, which won the 1988 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Paradise News (1991); Therapy, regional winner and finalist for the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Thinks ... (2001), and Author, Author (2004). He has written numerous books of literary criticism, including Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with Structuralism (1981), and After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990). In addition, he has published several collections of essays, lectures, reviews and other occasional writings: Write On (1986), The Art of Fiction (1992), a collection of articles which originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, The Practice of Writing (1996) and Consciousness and the Novel (2002) . Lodge's work has been translated into 25 languages and many of his books are available in Penguin.
Small World was adapted as a television serial in 1988 and Lodge himself adapted Nice Work, which won the Royal Television Society's Award for the best drama serial of 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990. In 1994 he adapted Martin Chuzzlewit for a six-part BBC serial. His first stage play, The Writing Game, was produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1990, and he adapted it for Channel 4 in 1995. His second play, Home Truths, was premiered at Birmingham in 1998, and he subsequently turned it into a novella, published under the same title in 1999. His latest book for Penguin is The Year of Henry James (2007).
Thinks, the new paperback from bestselling author David Lodge, is an elegant, dazzling exploration of love, artificial intelligence and the intricacies of the human heart. Here, he talks exclusively to penguin.co.uk about consciousness, deception and the art of the novel.
You've written a dozen novels and you've taught the novel for forty years. You obviously feel that it is an important art form. Recently VS Naipaul, another distinguished novelist, has gone on record as saying that he thinks the novel is a very tired form and that non-fiction is more important. How do you feel about this?
The death of the novel has been much exaggerated and frequently announced and turns out not to be true. First of all there's a kind of innate human need for narrative which seems to go very deep into human nature, and the novel is the form of narrative - literary narrative - that the modern world has evolved. In a purely sociological sense I don't see any decline in interest in either reading or writing fiction, rather the contrary. The other media that tell stories like television or film are very dependent on novels and novelists for their material. I think it's an inexhaustible art form.
Just at this moment we see an interest in using the techniques of the novel to write about real experience, so-called 'life writing', and that's an interesting development. There's perhaps a certain loss of confidence in fiction, but that kind of so-called 'life writing' still depends on the novel tradition and on that tradition being kept alive. After all, Mr Naipaul has just published another novel so he can't be completely disillusioned in its possibilities.
Ralph Messenger, the central character in your new novel, Thinks, represents everything that’s hostile to religion and a cosy view of the world; he forwards a scientific, reductive view of human behaviour, but yet comes across as a likeable figure. Was this deliberate?
Some readers absolutely detest Ralph, women particularly, but I was very anxious not to put my thumb in the scales in this novel and to give the characters an equal crack of the whip. I find people tend to read the novel in terms of their own convictions, so people who hate artificial intelligence hate Ralph and people who like artificial intelligence quite like him. Researching the novel made me read a lot of evolutionary theory, which gave a materialist account of the universe and man’s part in it. I found this all pretty persuasive and it’s something that anyone who wants to maintain a religious, or even a humanist position, has to grapple with.
In Nice Work, you thanked various industrialists who helped you research the book. Did you call on the help of scientists in researching Thinks?
I do more research now than I used to. As you go on writing novels you use up your life experience and you have to go out and find material; or you get an idea which seems a good idea in principle but you don’t know anything about the background to it, so you have to go out and research it. Very often the process of research will actually throw up things you hadn’t anticipated. Nice Work was a good example; originally, I wanted to start with a businessman who’d been made redundant and the story would start there. But, I thought I’d better know what kind of work he did, so I got a friend to let me shadow him at work, and that experience was so fascinating that I decided to base the novel around it.
In the case of Thinks there was a bit more book research. I started by reading reviews about two books on consciousness. I’d never heard of either of them and realised there was a big field of interdisciplinary enquiry about the nature of consciousness which had suddenly developed in the nineties. I then made friends with the Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham and picked his brains and those of his colleagues. I went to seminars and gradually tried to soak up the language and the mental climate in which these people lived. It took quite a long time before I felt at all confident of being able to reproduce this milieu which was very, very foreign to me when I started. I imagine that I’ll always have to do this kind of preparation now. In the case of Thinks, I did feel that even if I never write this novel I’m learning an awful lot which I should have learned a long time ago. I had a very anti-science attitude as a student, partly because science was taught so badly at my school, so I was catching up a lot.
Thinks has a very good plot, it seems as if you concentrate more on plot than a lot of contemporary novelists …
The novels do have quite strong narrative lines. I am interested in narrative in storytelling, and that may be because of my critical interest in the novel. There’s always a delicate problem because the more complex your plot, the more you risk losing the reader’s belief. On the other hand, the slighter the plot, the more you risk losing the reader’s interest. What interests the reader is having the questions that the story raises answered and the more questions you can have the better. With Thinks, the more I worked on the book, the more I became interested in the theme of deception, therefore I needed lots of surprises in the plot. I needed the reader to share the characters’ sense of surprise when things they’d assumed turned out not to be true at all.
