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.
