David Lodge

Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But as the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of knowledge about this phenomenon that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in the light of recent investigations in cognitive science, neuroscience, and related disciplines. How, Lodge asks, does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, he pursues this question down various paths: how does the novel's method compare with that of other creative media suc... Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But as the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of knowledge about this phenomenon that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in the light of recent investigations in cognitive science, neuroscience, and related disciplines. How, Lodge asks, does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, he pursues this question down various paths: how does the novel's method compare with that of other creative media such as film? How does the consciousness (and unconscious) of the creative writer do its work? And how can criticism infer the nature of this process through formal analysis? In essays on Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, John Updike and Philip Roth, and in reflections on his own practice as a novelist, Lodge brings to light - and to engaging life

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and ensuing post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth. But everything changes when his glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer in Heidelberg. Kath left home long ago to work for the American army, and introduces her sixteen-year-old brother to a deliriously fast, furious and extravagant lifestyle. Dazzled by the indulgence and glamour of their way of life, but at the same time sensitive to the broken spirits of ordinary Germans beneath this sparkling surface, Timothy will find that his summer holiday is in more ways than one an unforgettable rite of passage. 'Lodge has brilliantly dramatized a kind of Anglo-American encounter. To have made so well-ordered and humanly engaging a work of fiction in the process is a striking achievement' The Times Literary Supplement 'His novels engender a flowing sense of fun' Spectator

Bernard Walsh, agnostic theologian, has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his reluctant father Jack, to visit Jack's dying, estranged sister it feels more like purgatory than paradise. Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Haiwaii. Until, that is, he stumbles on something he had given up hope of finding: the astonishing possibility of love.

Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties, still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before, is a visiting teacher of creative writing at a university where Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist with a special interest in Artificial Intelligence and an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute. He is an atheist and a materialist; she is a Catholic who has lost her faith but still yearns for the consolations of religion. Ralph is attracted to Helen and she, in spite of her principles, to him. They argue about the nature of human consciousness, and the different ways it is examined in science and literature, as she resists with weakening resolution Ralph's efforts to seduce her. David Lodge has distilled the story of his acclaimed novel Thinks... to create a witty and absorbing drama about a moral, emotional and intellectual struggle between two exceptional people.

The Rhythm Method is the curse of young Adam Appleby's life and the cause of his children's. While Adam gestates his thesis in the British Museum, his wife worries at home because her period is late and a fourth little bundle of (expensive) joy seems to be on the way, thanks to 'Vatican Roulette'. Though Adam's experience is constantly coloured by the authors he is studying, one distinction remains clear: 'Literature is mostly about having sex, and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.' A sharply perceptive comic novel, "London Bridge is Falling Down" brilliantly captures the absurd, pitiful dilemma of Catholics in the days when the Pill was just an enticing rumour.

"A trio of dazzling novels in a comic mode that the author has now made completely his own...a cause for celebration. " -The New York Times Book ReviewDavid Lodge's three delightfully sophisticated campus novels, now gathered together in one volume, expose the world of academia at its best-and its worst. In Changing Places, we meet Philip Swallow, British lecturer in English at the University of Rummidge, and the flamboyant American Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University, who participate in a professorial exchange program at the close of the tumultuous sixties. Ten years later in Small World, older but not noticeably wiser, they are let loose on the international conference circuit-along with a memorable and somewhat oversexed cast of dozens. And in Nice Work, the leftist feminist Dr. Robyn Penrose at Rummidge University is assigned to shadow the director of a local engineering firm, sparking a collision of ideologies and lifestyles that seems unlikely to foster anything other than mutual antipathy.

In 2004, Henry James featured as a character in no less than three novels - David Lodge's Author, Author was one of them. With insightful and amusing candour, here he traces the history of his book from conception to publication, pondering the mystery - and indeed the anguish - of so many novels about James appearing at the same time. Lodge's reflections on his own creative practice are accompanied by studies of the genesis, composition and reception of key works by James himself, as well as other novelists from George Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov, and J.M. Coetzee to Graham Greene.

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marraige, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence 'Tubby' Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst. As Tubby's life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks - via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood - on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment.

Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he has good reason to feel pleased with himself. As Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness - 'the last frontier of scientific enquiry'. He enjoys an affluent life style subsidised by the wealth of his American wife, Carrie. Known to colleagues on the conference circuit as a womaniser and to Private Eye as a 'Media Dong', he has reached a tacit understanding with Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own back yard. This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a distinguished novelist still grieving for the sudden death of her husband more than a year ago, who has rented out her London house and taken up a post as writer-in residence at Gloucester University, partly to try and get over her bereavement. Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a world-view radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph's bold advances, but resists on moral principle. The stand-off between them is shattered by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum, 'We can never know for certain what another person is thinking.'

David Lodge’s first full-length play examines that curious fixture in the writing game where the amateurs meet the professionals – on a course in creative writing. Maude, author of nine bestsellers, and Simon, with one sensational success to his name, are veterans of this particular course: Leo, a campus-based American novelist astounded by the dilettante approach of the English, is the odd man out. The idea is to put the students under pressure, but in the converted barn that houses the tutors, professional and sexual tensions, past slights and current rivalries rapidly build to a fierce head of steam. Out of these pressures, David Lodge distils a sharply observed comedy of the problems and preoccupations of the writer as the professionals, striving to explain to enthusiastic beginners how to do it, are forced to confront an altogether trickier question: why on earth do they themselves write in the first place? Delicately probing, nimbly parodic, uncomfortably on target, Lodge’s incisive study of writers at work and at odds will bring the pleasure of recognition to all readers of fiction – and to most of those in the game. David Lodge's first full-length play examines that curious fixture in the writing game where the amateurs met the professionals -- on a course in creative writing. Maude, author of nine bestsellers, and Simon, with one sensational success to his name, are veterans of this particular course: Leo, a campus-based American novelist astounded by the dilettante approach of the English, is the odd man out. The idea is to put the students under pressure, but in the converted barn that houses the tutors, professional and sexual tensions, past slights and current rivalries rapidly build to a fierce head of steam. Out of these pressures, David Lodge distils a sharply observed comedy of the problems and preoccupations of the writer as the professionals, striving to explain to enthusiastic beginners how to do it, are forced to confront an altogether trickier question: why on earth do they themselves write in the first place? Delicately probing, nimbly... David Lodge’s first full-length play examines that curious fixture in the writing game where the amateurs meet the professionals – on a course in creative writing. Maude, author of nine bestsellers, and Simon, with one sensational success to his name, are veterans of this particular course: Leo, a campus-based American novelist astounded by the dilettante approach of the English, is the odd man out. The idea is to put the students under pressure, but in the converted barn that houses the tutors, professional and sexual tensions, past slights and current rivalries rapidly build to a fierce head of steam. Out of these pressures, David Lodge distils a sharply observed comedy of the problems and preoccupations of the writer as the professionals, striving to explain to enthusiastic beginners how to do it, are forced to confront an altogether trickier question: why on earth do they themselves write in the first place? Delicately probing, nimbly parodic, uncomfortably on target, Lodge’s incisive study of writers at work and at odds will bring the pleasure of recognition to all readers of fiction – and to most of those in the game.