David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy: a hilarious epitaph for the seventies

There have been some comments that this blog is too negative. I haven’t counted the number of approving or disapproving posts, but it’s probably true that the negative outranks the positive quite substantially.

So it is refreshing indeed to report not one but three novels that are entertaining, informative, and full of narrative energy. They are the three novels comprising David Lodge’s sequence, The Campus Trilogy. The first, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), dsescribes the exchange of two academics, Morris Zapp from the US and Philip Swallow from the UK, at each other’s institutions, with plenty of opportunities to contrast the UK and US academic systems. Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), introduces the character of Persse McGarrigle, a rather innocent young Irish researcher, and his search for the woman he thinks he loves, with rather obvious (but funny) echoes of Percival searching for the Holy Grail.

Finally, Nice Work (1988) expands the series well beyond higher education to include the world of a small industrial company in Rummidge, and the interaction of Vic Wilcox, the industry boss, and Robyn Penrose, junior lecturer at Rummidge, as part of a government initiative for academia and industry to get closer together. They do indeed get closer together, an episode that is a tour de force, given that it is highly unlikely an academic and industrialist would ever have any time for each other in the real world. 

One character, Philip Swallow, appears in all three novels, and much of the action (pretty much the whole of the action of Nice Work) is set in Rummidge, a loosely fictionalized Birmingham. Having enjoyed the novels so much, I am slightly reluctant to investigate too closely how and why they are successful, but as a former student of literature, I feel it is my duty to, ahem, show off my skills and discover how they work.

One achievement is that Lodge writes from the inside. As a former professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, he had an intimate knowledge of a redbrick university in a large industrial city. Fascinatingly, however, he doesn’t attempt to make the city or the university any more appealing than it is. He is a remarkably objective and often unsympathetic describer of the industrial midlands, particularly in the third novel.

Remarkably, Lodge is very aware, as an academic might be in Birmingham, but not in Oxford or Cambridge, that academic life is not the only way to live. Nice Work contains lengthy arguments between the industrialist and the academic, each defining their own existence, and the academic is by no means wholly successful. The academic career structure is shown to be elitist, unfair, underpaid, and often irrelevant to the local community, yet Robyn Penrose, dreaming of obtaining a tenured position, defends it passionately – even though she is likely to be a victim of the very system she defends.

Wilcox said, ‘Who were you trying to hurt?’

‘Hurt?’

‘A strike has to hurt someone. The employers, the public. Otherwise it has no effect.’

Robyn was about to say, ‘The Government,’ when she saw the trap.

It becomes clear to Robyn that the strike has little effect on the government, the students, or the general public. The exchange is revealing for Lodge’s remarkable balance. Few professors would have such a dispassionate and even jaundiced idea of their own profession; you feel that these novels could not have emerged from the far more precious world of Oxford or Cambridge, where there is no countervailing force to the academy.

Still more remarkable, the novels make a solid attempt to communicate some idea of literary theory. I came away from the novels with a refreshed idea of what terms such as metaphor, metonymy, and less common, aporia, meant, even though I had dutifully learned them years ago. In any case, my university education largely predated structuralism and literary theory.

Not only can Lodge balance academia and industry, he also succeeds impressively, to my mind, in balancing male and female attitudes. Admittedly, some of the female characters, notably Hilary Swallow and Mrs Wilcox, appear to be mere ciphers, but some of the other younger women in the novels are very believable, notably Robyn Penrose. She is believable partly because she is so centred in a place and time. Her slightly hippy clothes, her possessions, even the way her partner Charles massages her, are so typical of the 1970s and 80s. And yet she is more than just a cipher. Despite her innocence, she tries to make sense of the world around her and to respond to it towards some kind of success; it’s almost tragic, that both Wilcox and Penrose are almost doomed in their respective home and work environments, oppressed by forces they have almost no control over, and yet they continue to struggle and to fight a very unequal battle. Lodge does not write about industry as an insider, and yet his depiction of a small-scale British manufacturing company trying to survive in a declining industrial environment is moving and almost tragic. Wilcox’s company has few options other than cost-saving – something it has in common with Rummidge University, faced with endless cuts in funding and hence staffing.

So, a set of incisive novels that seem unerring in their depiction of fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s, set against a brutal realistic background that offers little hope for the main characters. Similarly, family life, notably the life of the Swallows and the Wilcoxes, seems to have just one direction: down. By the end of the trilogy, Swallow is reduced to a hard-of-hearing, rather ineffectual head of department, unable to do anything to respond to external events. And yet the trilogy was compelling to read. A remarkable achievement.