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Culture clash: Reading David Lodge’s wonderful campus novel: ‘Nice Work’

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I loved reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, the third of his so-called “University Campus Trilogy” series of novels.

Published in 1988, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to Australian author Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. Lodge passed away in January this year, less than a month shy of his 90th birthday.

Nice Work is set in the fictional town of Rummidge, a large, industrial town in the north of England modelled somewhat on Birmingham.

The plot of the novel is centred around two characters, attractive and ambitious English lecturer and feminist Dr Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox, the grumpy, unhappily married managing director of a struggling steel parts manufacturing company.

The protagonists’ paths cross when Penrose, who is desperately trying to land a permanent job at the University of Rummidge agrees to take part in the “Shadow Scheme” a program devised to bridge the divide between elitisit world of academia and giant cogs of commerce and industry.

Every Wednesday, Penrose must drive to the offices of J.Pringle & Sons and shadow Wilcox as he goes about his day.

The novel is a modern and comic take on Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, about a woman who moves from the rural south of England to the industrialised north where she witnesses, in the fictional industrial town of Milton, the clashes between factory owners and workers amidst the industrial revolution.

In Lodge’s novel, Robyn Penrose – who ironically lectures on the industrial novel in English Literature but has never seen the inside of a factory – is appalled by the repetitive, menial work of men working in the cold and soulless J. Pringle & Sons factory she has been shown round.

Later, sitting in on a management meeting where she is only meant to be an observer, she starts arguing with Wilcox and his management team over plans to engineer the firing of a worker who is struggling to do his job.

“Excuse me,” said Robyn.

“Yes, what is it,” said Wilcox, looking up impatiently from his spreadsheet.

“Do I understand correctly that you are proposing to pressure a man into making mistakes so that you can sack him?”

Wilcox stared at Robyn. There was a long silence, such as falls over a saloon bar in a Western at moments of confrontation. Not only did the other men not speak; they did not move. They did not appear to even breathe. Robyn herself was breathing rather fast, in short, shallow pants.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, Dr Penrose,” said Wilcox at last.

“Oh, but it is,” said Robyn hotly. “It’s the business of anyone who cares about truth and justice.”

David Lodge

And so, Lodge, sets up the ideological battle between his two chief protagonists which plays out amidst the grim shadows of machinery, blue-collar men and cold and soulless sheds and the bustling corridors, hallowed lecture theatres and academic politics of Rummidge University.

It’s a delightfully funny battle full of exasperation and sexual tension as well as education as Wilcox teaches Penrose about the dirty world of industrial dealing and backstabbing, whilst Penrose expands his narrow view of the world and removes his stigma about the world of academia and learning.

And to spice things up, unhappily married Wilcox finds himself growing increasingly attracted to his younger shadow. (An early comic episode in the novel is Wilcox’s confusion when he finds his shadow is a woman and not a man, a fault partly due to the misspelling of Robyn’s name with the more masculine “Robin”).

One of the reasons the novel is so enjoyable is that both protagonists are likeable, basically decent and willing to shift their attitudes. Lodge also has plenty to say about the importance of education and commerce, theoretical points of view versus practical reality and the way one’s behaviours are shaped by the uncertainty of one’s lives: Wilcox’s job security is under threat from strikes, dwindling profit margins and cheaper competitor’s while likewise Penrose has only a temporary position at the university while older, less capable men have the power to deny her a permanent role.

Set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s education cuts and her battle to reduce the power of the trade unions, Nice Work is ultimately an uplifting novel about how people from vastly different backgrounds can come to understand a vastly different point of view – and end up not just friends, but perhaps, even for a time… a bit more than that.

And it’s a real pleasure to read. Lodge is a wonderful comic writer.

(Nice Work was made into a four-episode BBC min-series, which aired in 1989. I found all of the episodes on YouTube. I haven’t yet watched it myself).

Kafka-esque, but not his best: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘When We Were Orphans’

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It was both refreshing and a relief to read that even a great writer like Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize, did not think that highly of his strange detective novel “When We Were Orphans”.

“It’s not my best book,” Ishiguro said after it was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize.

Having demolished Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in a single reading many years ago (as near perfect a novel as you will ever come to read, accompanied by a fine motion picture adaptation) it is not hard to see why he made this observation.

It’s a very odd, disjointed and at times completely baffling book, with periods of rather logical storytelling following by very strange Kafkaesque episodes where things seemingly simple and straightforward – like travelling a short distance from one place to another – take on these long, slow, nightmarish journeys that never seem to end.

Not that there are not a lot of very interesting and enjoyable aspects to When We Were Orphans, plus there is that wonderfully precise and elegant prose of Ishiguro to keep you reading during the bemusing bits.

To summarise the plot, the book tells the story of Christopher Banks, who after being orphaned in Shanghai as a young boy in the early 1930s (when both his mother and father disappear from the city’s International Settlement in sinister circumstances), returns to England where he is educated and becomes a famous crime-solving detective.

Determined not be to be “diverted by the more superficial priorities of London life” Banks nonetheless falls for the charms of enigmatic socialite Sarah Hemmings – an orphan like himself – whilst becoming something of a minor celebrity for his ability to unravel cases.

The book weaves between Banks’ case solving pursuits in the English countryside, his intermingling in the upper echelons of London society, and with memories and flashbacks of his adventurous Shanghai childhood in the sheltered International Settlement. Here he remembers the times spent playing with his Japanese friend and neighbour Akira, with whom he forms a deep almost brotherly bond.

Banks also returns to recollections of the grand colonial mansion he lived in as a young boy and the events that led to first his father’s sudden disappearance and then soon after that of his feisty mother – a beauty in an “older, Victorian tradition, “handsome” rather than pretty.

Christopher’s father worked for a European shipping company called Butterfield and Swire, which was (according to the author) secretly involved in the flourishing Opium trade. Butterfield and Swire was a real company that transformed into a global multinational. Swire unsuccessfully sued Ishiguro in an attempt to get him to change the book, which implied the company turned millions into addicts and made vast profits in the process.

Before Banks’s father disappeared on his way to work, his mother had become vocal and outspoken about the activities of the company he worked for.

“Are you not ashamed to be in service of such a company?” he remember hearing his mother yell at his father. “How can your conscience rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?”

Twenty years later, and after having adopted an orphaned child Jennifer as his own daughter, Banks decides to return to Shanghai in 1937 at the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (and as a great war looms across Europe) to solve the most important mystery of his life: his parents disappearance. He believes grandiosely that solving this crime will have far-reaching repercussions including averting the coming world war catastrophe.

In Shanghai, mingling among the snobbish expat community, at dinner parties, the war appears to be just over the horizon and drawing nearer. Ishiguro builds up an oppressive atmosphere as machine gun fire and explosions are heard not far away.

“Another thunderous explosion had rocked the room, provoking a few ironic cheers. I then noticed a little way in front of me, some French windows had opened and people had pushed out to the balcony.

“Don’t worry Mr Banks,” a young man said, grasping my elbow. “There’s no chance of any of that coming over here.”

A tram runs through Shanghai’s International Settlement.

Against the backdrop of the looming onset of war, Banks somehow believes that his parents are still locked up in a house in Shanghai by an opium warlord, despite 20 years having passed since their disappearance. He eventually locates the house he believes they are being held captive in and then the book descends into this Kafka-esque nightmare, where the house Banks believes his parents are in can be sighted through the bombed out ruins, but reaching it appears a never-ending hellish journey.

“Then I came upon a hole in a wall through which I could see only pitch blackness, but from which came the most overwhelming stink of excrement. I knew that to keep on course I should climb through into that room, but I could not bear the idea and kept walking. This fastidiousness cost me dear, for I did not another opening for some time, and thereafter, I had the impression of drifting further and further off my route.”

In his review of the novel, the Pulitizer Prize winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that ‘When We Were Orphans “has moments of enormous power, [but] it lacks the virtuosic control of language and tone that made ”Remains of the Day” such a tour de force.

“Indeed the reader is left with the impression that instead of envisioning – and rendering – a coherent new novel, Mr. Ishiguro simply ran the notion of a detective story through the word processing program of his earlier novels, then patched together the output into the ragged, if occasionally brilliant, story we hold in our hands.”

Certainly, I learnt a bit about life in Shanghai before the war, and the strange existence of the “International Settlement”. Also, I knew little about the Sino-Japanese War, which ran for eight years between 1937 and 1945 and was one of the most bloodiest in history.

But the novel itself, was a strange mishmash of a personal story set within historical events given an almost surrealist makeover that never really jelled for me (unlike the Remains of the Day, which so elegantly meshes the blind devotion of a loyal butler to an aristocratic employer wishing to promote Nazi appeasement.).

“When Banks goes back to Shanghai, we’re really not quite sure if it’s the real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation,” said Ishiguro in an interview about the book.

It certainly baffled me.

Damon Galgut, the power of nostalgia and ‘dark love’ for South Africa

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In an interview with the Mail & Guardian newspaper in December 2021, Damon Galgut, South Africa’s latest literary star, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, a novel about the disintegration of a white family amid the collapse of apartheid, said he had originally intended to call the book “Dark Love”.

Galgut said it was an “abstract allusion” to the family’s youngest daughter Amor Swart, whose affection for their long-suffering black domestic servant Salome is a central theme of the book.

“But,” says Galgut, “I wanted to tie it in with a parallel sense that if one loves South Africa it has to be a dark kind of love”.

This “dark love” is apparent in the two Galgut novels I read back-to-back, The Good Doctor and The Promise, and is something I can relate too deeply, even though I left South Africa 22 years ago.

Dr Waters: trying to “make a difference”

A beautiful, but troubled land, South Africa gets under your skin and in your bones: if you’ve grown up there, you never really leave – even if you do physically.

Galgut’s gift is to draw from that dark well of South African history, culture and experience, and build an engrossing story with deeply South African characters, and to unsettle and enthrall the reader.

“Galgut has mined his novel with small but powerful explosive charges, wrote the writer Christopher Hope in his review of The Good Doctor in 2003 (written for the Guardian).

“Damon Galgut has written a lovely, lethal, disturbing novel,”

The story of The Good Doctor takes place in a crumbling, ill-equipped rural hospital next to a backwater town in what was once a Black “homeland” – one of a series of puppet states created by the white nationalist apartheid regime to separate blacks from whites – but is now forgotten, left to decay in the new South Africa.

The title of the book refers to Dr. Laurence Waters, an idealistic medical school graduate who comes to the dysfunctional hospital hoping to “make a difference” as part of his year of compulsory, post-graduate community work.

His arrival and subsequent stay at the hospital is narrated by Dr. Frank Eloff a disillusioned and bitter veteran physician, one of just a handful of staff that keep the medical facility barely functioning under the management of its administrator and head surgeon Dr Ngema.

So ill-equipped is the hospital, that patients with more serious injuries have to be transported to the big city hospital, a long drive through the veld.

The hospital’s small band of staff include the Satanders – a doctor couple from Cuba who quarrel a lot about staying in South Africa – and a troubled black orderly called Tehogo, who is symbolic of that “lost generation” of unskilled Black South Africans, left on the margins of society after the fall of apartheid.

In some kind of precarious and delicate balancing act, the hospital has maintained it place in the natural order of things, keeping its distance from the chaos beyond its boundaries, until idealistic Dr Waters arrives and shatters its island status.

“It’s like something terrible happened here,” Laurence said. “That’s how it feels.

“Ja, but the opposite is true. Nothing has ever happened here. Nothing ever will, that’s the problem.”

The Good Doctor

Written in 2003 (and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) The Good Doctor reads like a parable of the collapse of the idea of the Rainbow Nation that briefly flourished after the 1994 democratic elections that installed Nelson Mandela as president, followed by the historic 1995 Rugby World Cup triumph.

Race relations, the juxtaposition of wealth and extreme poverty, the battle for power in the new South Africa and the naivety of those who think they can change things are all meshed together in Galgut’s novel with devastating and mesmerising effect.

Galgut also has a way of conjuring up a strange kind of nostalgia (though that may be the wrong word) among those readers who lived through those historical times.

Reading of a decaying hospital in a half-forgotten Homeland town, took me back to family holidays at the Mmbatho Sun (now called the Mmbatho Palms), an oasis of palm trees, sparkling blue swimming pools and gambling, set amid the dry and dusty veldt of the impoverished homeland of Bophuthatswana.

Hanging on the wall in the hotel foyer (I remember this so well) was a portrait of stern-faced Lucas Mangope in all his official puppet-state pomp and regalia, staring down on us wealthy whites, as we arrived for our luxury holidays and a roll of the dice at the roulette table.

It was of course absurd that we (well-off white South Africans) should enjoy our luxurious buffet breakfasts, sip cola-tonics and lemonades poolside and pull the handles of slot machines, all whilst being waited on hand and foot by an army of underpaid black servants.

Equally, it is absurd that young white graduate doctor – Galgut’s Dr Laurence Waters – working in a backwater hospital should think that he can “make a difference”; that he should be so naïve, reflects perhaps that unrealistic feeling we all had, standing to vote in the first elections in 1994, that the past could simply be swept under the rug.

While The Good Doctor confines itself to a relatively short period of narrative time, as well as a specific era in South Africa – the birth of the new democratic country – Galgut’s The Promise starts in 1986, during the State of Emergency, and spans 30 years. Over that time, and set against the backdrop of famous historical events in the evolution of the country towards democratic rule, it tells the tragic story of the Swart family and their haunting farm set amongst the stony koppies and veldt outside Pretoria.

The story is told through eyes and deaths of four members of the Swart family: Rachel Swart or “Ma”, her husband Herman “Manie” Swart (whose post-funeral gathering occurs during the momentous 1995 Rugby World Cup Final), Anton, their first child and only son, and Astrid, the middle daughter.

Connecting them all together is Amor, the youngest child, who carries the family’s guilt – a white person’s guilt for the things done to black South Africans under the apartheid system – and who is determined to fulfil her mother’s dying wishes that their faithful and long-suffering black servant Salome, be granted the deed to the crumbling house, that has been her home all the years she has served the family.

Galgut has a real gift for capturing the feeling of a place and time: for example that deep-seated resentment old Afrikaaners felt about the ending of apartheid and having to share the country with black people, but also their supreme and undying love of rugby.

At the farmhouse, following Manie’s funeral (he died from a poisonous snakebite at the reptile park he ran) the television is switched on in the build up to the World Cup Final.

While some family members are unhappy that the television is playing during what is meant to be a solemn gathering, Ockie, the unloved husband of Manie’s sister Marina has a “warm glow only partly due to Klipdrift” (a famous South African brandy enjoyed with Coke).

“…and God knows he took the new South Africa hard. But he has to admit, it’s nice to be able to play international sport again. Gives us a chance to donner people from faraway lands, and man we really fucked up those Samoan floppies a couple of weeks ago”.

The Promise

In another episode, Galgut writes how Anton, a white child, suckled on the nipple of Salome, such was the motherly bond despite the rules of apartheid forbidding such behaviour. While this may sound extreme to some readers, it was common, even when I was growing up, for black domestic workers (who we called “maids” or “nannies”) to care for white children as if they were their own, to bathe, clothe, feed and nurture them.

In an interview with the podcast 5X15, Galgut says Salome was was “mentally modelled on a Nanny I had”.

“My first nanny was a kind of substitute mother for me when I was really little…I’m talking the age of 2,3,4. Her name was Salome and I named the character after her, partly in tribute to her.”

“As you can imagine,” Galgut says later, “quite meaningful and intimate bonds can spring up in an artificial relationship like that”.

Drawing on the greats that have come before him – Athol Fugard, JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and others – Galgut is the latest gifted writer to explore the complexities of South Africa’s dark history, its often paradoxical race relations, and its troubled democratic rebirth.

He does so, in my opinion, with less literary pretention than those who have come before him. His writing style is more direct and accessible (you could say “modern”) but still poetic. That’s even the case when he’s writing about Joel Stransky kicking that magical drop goal, while an Afrikaaner family cheers him on, but refuses to embrace the New South Africa that allowed that moment to happen.

The Sense of Ending: in praise of the concise novel

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51hhJ8IdqyLDisappearing into Julian Barnes’s 2011 Booker prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending was so pleasurable an experience that I read his short 163 page novella twice.

This is rare for me. I don’t read many books more than once. They have to really intrigue and beguile me to encourage a second reading.

So I can add The Sense of An Ending to a narrow list of twice or even thrice-read books that includes JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the George Orwell novels Coming up for Air, 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

In each book, I found a central character whose view of the world I identified with, or with whom I made a connection in some meaningful way, or whose life I wanted to step into, even for just a little while: a chance to be angst-ridden teenage rebel and narrator of Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield wondering the streets of Manhattan, having conversations with nuns and prostitutes, or rotund London insurance salesman George Bowling in Coming up for Air who escapes to the country town of his youth, before the bombs of WW2 fall, or idealistic, starving and self-destructive poet, Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

In The Sense of an Ending I instantly liked and identified with Tony Webster, the 60-year-old divorced former arts administrator who has succeeded in living a life of little bother or regret, who does not fantasise “a markedly different life from the one that has been mine”.

Webster has accepted a modestly successful and peacable existence in a small London flat with his affairs neatly in order. He’s even on good terms with his ex-wife Margaret.

I’ve made my will; and my dealings with daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife, are, if less than perfect, at least settled. Or as I have persuaded myself. I’ve achieved a state of peaceableness or peacefulness. Because I get on with things. I don’t like mess and I don’t like leaving a mess.

But then he is forced to re-evaluate things – love, friendship, memory, the decisions he made and their consequences – when he receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier.

She is Sarah Ford, the recently deceased mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, who has bequeathed him £500 as well as the diary of his erudite, brilliant school friend, Adrian Finn, who committed suicide while at college and whose passing was described in the Cambridge Evening News under the headline: “Tragic Death of Promising Young Man”.

Adrian dated Veronica soon after Tony’s relationship with her ended. Having parted ways angrily via a dreadful, hurtful letter Tony, went travelling and in the days before email and mobile phones, only found out about his friends death many weeks later, when he returned home.

Tony’s mother wonders if Adrian killed himself “because he was too clever”. Tony comes to the conclusion that Adrian, who had great powers of reason and an amazing intellect, had come to the logical conclusion that he should end his life.

But then comes the promise of the diary, a way into his deceased friend’s mind and for Tony, who doesn’t like loose ends, the prospect of a definitive answer: a way to make sense of Adrian’s ending.

The only problem is his still very angry ex-girlfriend Veronica: she has the diary and won’t give it to him.

Instead she feeds him an extract with a complex maths equation that Tony must unravel.

In doing so he confronts his own decision to accept the path of an uneventful, non-confrontational life with no loose ends or complications, he begins to unravel the mystery of himself.

If this doesn’t quite explain why I like Tony so much (people who know me might say he and I have a lot in common)  then I think this observation in a review of the book in the New York Times explains it rather well:

Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle.

A day in the life: a review of “In Every Face I Meet” by Justin Cartwright

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evryface“In Every Face I Meet” is a 1995 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel by Justin Cartwright that takes place over the course of a single, pivotal London day in February 1990 in the life of melancholic forty-something business executive Anthony Northleach.

Northleach, a former talented rugby player (he once trialed for England ‘B’), works for a failing company (what it does is never quite revealed), convinced that the imminent release of Nelson Mandela will fundamentally shift the trajectory of the world, Britain and his own sense of existentialism.

Much of the novel is the inner monologue of Northleach – he recalls, with detailed wonder and awe, a brilliant try scored by English rugby captain Will Carling in a weekend drubbing of the French, he remembers pivotal moments from his childhood in the kingdom of Swaziland, he ponders his marriage, a passionate affair he once had, and his friendship with his best mate and fellow former rugby player Mike, whose life is spinning out of control.

The secondary storyline is that of Chanelle, a crack-addict and prostitute living in a council estate and her black boyfriend/pimp Jason – sporting a medallion of Nelson Mandela around his neck – living on the outer fringes of London society in the final vestiges of Thatcherism.

Without giving too much away, the two worlds – Northleach’s and Chanelle and Jason’s – are on course for a horrifying collision, but what the novel is really about is Northleach’s longing for the past and his disappointment with the present.

It seems that Cartwright has honed in on the second difficult period in an adult male’s life, (the first being adolescence with all its clumsy fumblings and urges) that period from about 40 onwards when there is cause to reflect and ask the question: “Have I lived a purposeful life?”

And if not, “Is there still time to find some meaning?”

Indeed, the character of Northleach must contain parts of Cartwright himself – who was born and schooled in South Africa, the son of a left-wing newspaper editor, and who wrote the book in London, when he was in his late forties.

I have read “In Every Face I Meet” twice – once while travelling overseas in 2010 and now again, when it turned up in a crate of goods shipped over from South Africa.

What’s so enjoyable about reading the book is being inside Anthony Northleach’s head for one day of his life, following him from the office, where he muses about whether his dowdy secretary will ever make it to Thailand, then on the Tube into Soho for lunch in an Italian restaurant with Mike (bumping into Will Carling along the way) where he invites Mike to come with him on his odyssey to Cape Town and finally on his fateful drive home where he encounters Chanelle and Jason.

Northleach, despite his many failings, is immensely likeable with his sardonic political and philosophical commentary, and his honest reflectiveness.

He (and the novel itself) will particularly appeal to white South African-expats (be they in Britain, Australia or entrenched in any other “safe” country),  nearing or past forty that still have a strong sense nostalgia for the old country, especially if you were there at the time Mandela was freed and the inkling of a utopian “Rainbow nation” first emerged.

Indeed, the book was a gift from a South African expat colleague and friend who raved about it and was right when he said I would find it immensely enjoyable to read.

Looking back to February 1990 when Mandela took his first steps to freedom, they do feel like halcyon days, filled with hope and the prospect of something new and fresh, but also scary and uncertain. We certainly lived through history in the making.

Reflecting back on my own life as I fast approach forty – there is much about Northleach’s longings and existential angst that resonates with me.