David Lodge and his fellow academic, critic and friend, the late Malcolm Bradbury were quite a literary double act. Together they guided the English campus novel on from the point where Kingsley Amis had left it. True, their satirical insider's send-up of British academic life does not amount to one of the great achievements of European literature, but they have contributed their share of comic moments and earned their places as traditional English comic realists. Even so, Lodge and Bradbury have both paid the price of being acknowledged as shrewd critics and teachers who also happened to write novels.
Lodge's characteristically frantic new novel, Thinks, could, for several reasons, also be called "Re-think" in that his central themes and preoccupations have not changed while his characters are the usual bunch recruited from some vast central casting file marked "Unpleasant Academic Types". Come to think of it, if a Martian were to read this novel as an aid to understanding Earthlings, he, she or it would promptly turn the spaceship around and head back to Mars. The narrative is unique for its relentless chronicling of bad behaviour. Nobody in life is perfect, but the fact that none of the selfish, hypocritical characters in Thinks is remotely likeable may mean this book is more profound than one might suspect from merely reading it.
Lodge is not a stylist and this novel is turgid stuff until salvation emerges in the form of a very obvious twist. If his eleventh novel has a central problem it is his main character, the appallingly selfish Ralph Messenger, academic and media darling, who runs his Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester with apparent efficiency, while his private life is torn between the freedom of doing as he pleases as long as his wife is not embarrassed - and the fear of divorce and the loss of her money. The narrative begins with Messenger about to begin an experiment that will occupy a large part of the novel, the tracking of his thoughts, "the random thoughts, if anything can be random, the random thoughts passing through a man's head, all right my head, at a randomly chosen time and place . . . " Messenger's thoughts don't appear to be overly concerned with science. His sexual adventures, past, present and future dominate his musings while the women are little more than physical entities. His domestic kingdom is ruled by Carrie; American, fat, rich and tough enough to deal with a philandering husband. Lodge doesn't even try to make her a character. Once spectacularly beautiful, a fact she later casually confirms, she has changed. Messenger likens being intimate with her to leaping on a bouncing castle.
Early on in the novel he is still engaging in furtive silent sexual encounters with a colleague's wife. Nothing means anything. Into this cosy little world of middle-class intrigues comes Helen Reed, a well-known novelist still mourning her husband's death. As a means of deflecting her current writer's block she has agreed to teach a creative writing course at the university. It is familiar Lodge territory; campus betrayals and cover-ups. Messenger, it seems, is Lodge's variation of Bradbury's obnoxious Dr Howard Kirk, eponymous anti-hero of The History Man (1975) as a greedy 50year-old determined to eat everything he sees and bed every woman he meets. When not discussing science, he seems crazed and devoid of feeling. During another of his consciousness recording sessions, he speculates about Helen Reed's sadness. "I shouldn't think she's had it since her husband died, she gives off a kind of aura of vowed chastity . . . I wonder how long I would abstain from sex if Carrie were to die suddenly, not long I suspect, well I know it wouldn't be . . . It's rather shocking but . . . if I imagine Carrie dying, the first thought that comes into my mind is not a picture of myself distraught and grieving, but of being free to f--k other women . . . without any qualms of guilt or fear of discovery . . . Of course I'm sure I'd be genuinely distraught and grief-stricken if it actually happened, and perhaps I might lose all interest in sex for a while, though I doubt it . . . more likely to go the other way, seek relief in another woman's arms . . . And of course I'd inherit at least some of Carrie's money, I would be rich as well as free . . . "
Messenger is an improbable character, breezy and brutal. Even more irritating is his latest lust object, Helen, the grieving novelist who immediately allows herself to be drawn into the Messenger domestic scene and weekend cottage hot-tub. Her journal exposes her as a smug, conceited and cold individual whose righteousness eventually yields to a desire for revenge. Lodge is far more of a commentator than storyteller, his insights are more topical than personal. Technology and science threaten to overwhelm the narrative, making Helen, with her store of literary references and belief in literature as the surest way to understanding what goes on in people's heads, far more of a device than a credible character. Ironically, one of the best lines in the novel is when Messenger admits to his tape recorder "I'd taken the trouble to speed-read The Eye of the Storm [one of Helen's novels that she had unwittingly given the title of a Patrick White novel] before. It's a rather tedious story of a woman going into and coming out of a depressive illness . . . "
Lodge's intelligence and awareness invariably prove more hindrance than advantage. Thinks is a disappointment, asserting itself only when it is too late to matter. It's a shame. In 1995 Lodge published Therapy, which, despite the success of his 1984 Booker shortlisted campus and literary conference romp Small World, is his best novel. In it, Laurence "Tubby" Passmore, the narrator, is a fast-talking, fat, bald south London scriptwriter now made good through a television domestic sitcom. Self-absorbed but likeable, he can afford the team of therapists tending his psychological and physical problems. The first 100 pages contain Lodge's best writing. But as the narrative falls apart, Lodge the academic takes over and he loses Tubby's voice. Thinks achieves minor comic traces. Messenger's hectic narrative jars against Helen's mannered journal, while the main narrative plods along. Lodge does make us ponder the nature of thinking, but too many opportunities are lost along the way in an unconvincing, often cruel narrative in which the antics of the two-dimensional characters merely confirm that human behaviour and thought are both premeditated and random. While Bradbury's last novel, To the Hermitage, for all its randomness possesses a saving light touch, Lodge here imposes science and philosophy on a lightweight narrative which has neither the comedy nor the profundity to support them.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
