‘My imagination,” David Lodge once wrote, “seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures and characters into contact and conflict”. He was talking specifically about the genesis of his “breakthrough novel”, Changing Places, which found so much comedy – broad and subtle, oblique and laugh-out-loud – in the contrast between British and American ways of academic life. But the words could apply to all of his work, and they help to explain why he excelled in a mode of distinctively British comedy that won him devoted fans not just in his own country but all over the US and continental Europe.
Changing Places was published at the high-water mark of the British postwar male comic novel. The ripples sent out by Lucky Jim 20 years earlier could still be felt, Evelyn Waugh’s novels were a recent memory, Wodehouse had only just died, Tom Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury (Lodge’s close friend) were high in the bestseller lists. To the dry sense of the ridiculous shared by these writers, Lodge added his lightly worn feelings of spiritual angst as an “agnostic Catholic” and a flexible approach to literary technique which came from his admiration for the great modernists. One of the reasons Changing Places still feels so fresh is the way it hops so expertly between literary modes, from letters to found texts, from third-person narration to film script: the work of a man who had read and digested his early 20th-century masters.
