David Lodge has entertained readers for forty years with his often hilarious tales of on- and off-curriculum shenanigans at university campuses. Penguin has published eighteen of Lodge's books in paperback since 1978, and here he has select-ed some of the most memorable moments from his novels, illustrating the high-minded (and low- minded life of the academic, and the changing fortunes of Britain's places of higher education.
This little book contains a personal selection of scenes from my novels of academic life, sometimes called 'campus novels', though the word 'campus' was relatively new in Britain when the first of them, The British Museum is Falling Down, was published in 1965 . The campus novel is typically focussed on the humanities rather than the sciences, and treats the university as a piece of territory somewhat removed from the hurly-burly of ordinary life, a 'small world' in which ambition and desire generate comedy rather than tragedy. There is invariably an element of artifice and literary self-consciousness in the genre, of which Shakespeare's courtly campus play, Love's Labour's Lost, was a distant precursor.
Nevertheless the campus novel has reflected real changes both in academic culture and in society at large over the last fifty-odd years, and in revisiting my own books to make this selection I am struck by the extent of the mutations. Changing Places, for instance, set in 1969, now seems like a historical novel . Its comedy is largely based on differences between academic life in England and in America, many of which no longer obtain. The two systems have drawn closer together: American universities have become less euphoric places, English universities more competitive, as have the countries to which they belong. The massive expansion of British higher education, Thatcherite economics, and the hegemony of 'management' in every sector of society, have forced our universities to adopt American-style modular courses, largely abandon traditional tutorial teaching, and purge their faculties of the amusing unproductive eccentrics who once found a comfortable home there.
The action of Small World takes place in 1979, the year Mrs Thatcher was elected to power. International conference-going would never be so easy or so exciting again, certainly for British academics . The tutorial system still survives at Rummidge University in Nice Work, set in 1986 and published two years later, but its days were numbered; and in other respects the novel presents a picture of university life that will be recognizable to present-day students and teachers, one in which the pastoral seclusion of the campus, whether literal or metaphorical, from the real world of social, political and economic forces, has gone for ever. Yet it was over this very same period that many of the best and brightest minds in the humanities, as if in some instinctive, collective act of resistance to the new climate of pragmatism and accountability in higher education, embraced a system of thought, loosely known as Theory, which subverted common sense and was almost incomprehensible to the layman. This phenomenon is also represented in these pages.
If you like this book, you may also like these:
The Scales of Justice - John Mortimer
Three Trips - John Updike
The Queen in Hell Close - Sue Townsend