In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in London. At the same time, his debut stage play The Writing Game opened at the Birmingham Rep. Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and partner on the twin tracks of literary academia and serio-comic fiction, had come to Birmingham to stay and see the show. After a starry night in the West End, and ‘a brief whirl around the dance floor’, Lodge sped back home. He arrived at 3.30 a.m., but found that his wife Mary ‘had accidentally locked me out, and I had to throw gravel up at our bedroom window from the back garden to wake her without disturbing the Bradburys’. Mr Pooter may have joined the A-list, but mishaps and pratfalls still dog his every step.
Lodge’s 15 novels reveal a sly and droll ventriloquist who knows exactly how to fix a mood or modify a key through the timbre of a storyteller’s voice. In this second volume of memoirs, the contrast between his mid-career procession of triumphs, adventures and accolades and the deadpan, humdrum delivery is wholly conscious and controlled. Who knew, for instance, that this proud adoptive Brummie had a long-standing link with Hawaii — the location of his Paradise News — after his Auntie Eileen settled there? Although research for that novel involved a dash from the museum in Waikiki straight to a bar ‘with topless go-go girls on a catwalk’, Lodge tends to make his Pacific excursions to care for Eileen sound like trips to Sutton Coldfield. Even a tour of Pearl Harbor turns out to be merely ‘extremely interesting, though not very relevant to my novel’.
Self-effacing, borderline pedestrian, this Diary of a Somebody tone does a double job.
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