There’s a blurb on the back of my Penguin paperback, allegedly from the New Republic: ‘Lodge is pure dazzling style, book after book, in his fusion of form and content.’
Well, that may be true of David Lodge’s other books but it certainly isn’t true of this one, which is pretty transparently adapted from a playscript. Lodge admits this in a foreword, but you don’t need to read that to figure it out. All the action, plot and character in this novella emerge through dialogue. We never get a direct look inside the characters’ minds and the non-dialogue sentences in the text read like stage directions. If that’s a stylistic fusion of form and content, I’m Italo Calvino.
For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.
The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.
For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.
The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.
