Lodge's novels are always disturbingly on-the-mark about perennial academic situations and characters. This one contrasts British and American academic lives, and his humorous account still seems accurate to me. ( )

For some reason I have always particularly enjoyed novels sent in schools or universities, and this falls squarely in that group. I first read this book nearly forty years ago. Indeed, I was prompted to pick it up back then after having read its then recently-published sequel, Small World. While they feature many of the same characters, they also both function as stand-alone novels.

Back then, I recall enjoying the sequel more than the original. I was prompted to reread this one having seen it featured in a series of articles in The Times espousing the benefits and enjoyment to be offered from reading a selection of older books that had not quite achieved ‘Classic’ status. Another book from that series which I expect to look at soon is Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul. I know from my nerdy list (now extending to almost 5,200 books) that I have read that, too, but it must have been even longer ago than my first turn at Changing Places, and I remember next to nothing about it.

In writing about university life David Lodge was playing with familiar material, having been a successful and prominent lecturer in English literature, teaching first for the British Council and then at Birmingham University. One of the principal protagonists who change places in the novel is Phillip Swallow, a long-established lecturer in English literature at the University of Rummidge, modelled closely on Birmingham. Swallow has developed an extremely eclectic approach to his literary studies. On the positive side, this has left him with an extensive knowledge that transcends genres, but it has also rendered him too much of a generalist to be widely recognised in academic circles. As a consequence, he has not been promoted within his department, and has little prospect of any such development in the foreseeable future.

His American counterpart is Morris Zapp, Professor of English Literature at Plotinus University, in the state of Euphoria (modelled on Berkeley in California). Zapp has a glowing reputation as a scholar of Jane Austen, and who has had a very high profile career. Ordinarily he would have no interest in an exchange to an English university other than Oxford (or perhaps that other place out in the fens), but his domestic circumstances push him into it. His latest wife is pressing for a divorce, and Zapp considers that a sojourn abroad might alleviate the tensions between them.

Consequently Swallow and Zapp exchange roles for six months, with, as the trailer for a sitcom would say, hilarious consequences. Lodge manages the contrast between their respective roles very adroitly. Unlike Zapp, Swallow does not hold a long suit when it comes to self confidence or assertiveness, and is amazed by the wholly alien approach to study and life in general on an American campus. Zapp, meanwhile, is equally shocked by the whole spectre of life in Rummidge, and by perpetually low profile maintained by his new colleagues and the student community.

There are further sharp contrasts between life on the West Coast of America and a city in the heart of the English Midlands. Nearly fifty years on from when it was written, these may seem rather cliched and predictable. However, they do, still, offer some telling insights into the differences in everyday life between the two locations.

A few years after the book was published, I would experience a similar exposure to a different world, spending a year at UCLA to do postgraduate work following on from my initial degree in Leeds. With the benefit of that perspective, I recognise the acuteness of many of David Lodge’s observations. I hasten to add that the similarities between my experiences and those of the novel’s protagonists were merely geographical.

I am glad I re-read this, and am looking forward to tackling Small World shortly. ( )

A comfort read: light satire about England and how the English perceive America and Americans. I might have enjoyed it more in the dead of winter. ( )

Morris Zapp, profesor norteamericano de la universidad californiana de Euphonia, es requerido por la universidad británica de Rummidge, por un período de seis meses. Philip Swallow, profesor de esta última, se trasladará a California para cubrir la plaza de su colega. Un intercambio académico que es también un intercambio ?más bien una sucesión de malentendidos? cultural y hasta un intercambio de parejas. Desternillante sátira sobre el choque cultural entre dos mundos.

Is humour a fragile or robust artform? A discussion took place here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/91238230 and one could not hope for a more apt example of the issues involved than this book. Paul kicked it off with the comment that ‘Comedy may be one of the frailer arts because it depends so much on the immediate cultural situation’.

Some of the best comedy does indeed depend on the immediate situation around it and its life span is sadly short as a consequence. Culturally referenced comedy less so than political, which is breathtaking in its immediacy - here today, gone tomorrow - but still; fashion-dependent culture of the moment, certainly will suffer the same fate.

Here we have a book, a comedy, firmly locked into its period of approximately 1970. The humour resulting from that is the shakiest part of the book. Incipient women’s lib, ban the bomb hippies, the emergent sexual ‘revolution’ – I’m guessing if you didn’t live through it, or were close enough for it to be in the ethos still - this would not be particularly amusing.

At the same time, we have the central theme of the book which is academia, how it functions and behaves and this is really awfully funny. And so far it remains timeless. Yes, I do want to say that. Right now I’d say it is timeless, but surely, I mean, really, surely, it can’t remain so. Because the implication that nothing has changed over the last forty years in terms of the inadequacies of academia, on which the humour is based, is well, a bit shocking, really. These days I’d say we would be pretty embarrassed by the very term women’s lib, we wish our parents hadn’t been hippies, marijuana is not exactly flavour of the month and if we talk about uni students having sex, we would not dare say ‘with the opposite sex’. It goes without saying that a uni student might have sex with more or less anything. Animal, vegetable, mineral, I imagine. The presumptuousness of ‘the opposite sex’ would be humourlessly politically incorrect.

And yet, when Lodge speaks of academia, it is a frozen world in which nothing has changed. Indeed, even though it is set in that period where something that might have seemed momentous was happening – students insisting on being part of the system, not merely the object of it – it still has not aged one bit. I wonder if the students realise how becoming part of the system has not changed it in the least.

So, much as I spent this book giggling and chuckling and snorting with laughter, at the same time it niggled me to think that the things he sends up, so obviously in need of reform, have not changed one tiny bit. I’m astonished by academia’s capacity to protect itself from outside interference and judgement. Astonished that it doesn’t see, as the self-regulatory community it evidently is, that things should change. Or, perhaps, sees but does nothing, is more like it.

Well, maybe one thing has changed in that world. Part of the outmoded humour is based on sex, and the involvements real and hoped-for and fantasised about by academics lusting after students. However much this is still in their hearts, maybe it is not, these days, talked about so often, or proferred as a source of humour. Yes?? I’m only guessing, but the ugly threat of sexual harrassment, although more offputting, I expect, to the school teacher, must also be an issue for the academic.

In Australia one has only to think of the money reaped by Helen Garner for The First Stone:

The First Stone is at once an account of one of Australia's most explosive sexual harassment cases and an investigation into the soul of sexual politics. To provide the framework for her inquiry, Helen Garner takes the very public case of a University of Melbourne college master accused of sexual harassment by two of his students. After reading about the charge in the newspaper, Garner, a longtime feminist, impulsively wrote a letter of support to the accused man. The letter was made public and in the wake of much criticism over her support of the man, Garner set out to explore the women's claims. Along the way she uncovers issues that challenge her notions of feminism, political activism, gender relations, and power dynamics. With a journalist's eye for detail, Garner leads the reader into a riveting examination of the nature of sex and power in contemporary society. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634139.The_First_Stone

I really do like a no-holds-barred approach to humour and yet there are things that somehow seem to be humorous in one period and repugnant in another. I go to a lot of old musicals, 1940s and 1950s. A routine part of the humour is violence against women – jokes about it, not the act itself. I can only suppose that what made it funny once was that we didn’t believe in it, whereas now that we know it really exists, it is not possible to find it funny. I’m not quite suggesting this pertains to Lodge, but I do wonder if what further decades will do to the legitimacy of his humour here and there.

Well, one thing we do know. His wonderful observations about the academic world will not have changed in their impact, whatever else might, and since it is the important part of his work, surely it will continue to be timeless.

It makes me think of the Rumpole books. My gut feeling is that they will never date and when one asks why that is, the answer is just the same. The legal system is even more able to protect itself from change than academia. It doesn’t change and therefore the humour does not lose its punch. Think of the cutting observations of the processes of the law Dickens makes in Bleak House and how completely pertinent they seem today. We find them amusing because everything is still as it always was. Thus with the law, and thus, it would so appear, with academia. I wonder what the historical antecedent to Lodge’s books are?

Or – and this just comes to me – maybe academia did change and Lodge documented it. Maybe in some dim dark past, it was a community of idealistic scholars on a search for the truth. Is that possible? Oh…stop laughing, would you?
( )