BOOK REVIEW: Consciousness and the novel

Secker and Warburg, 18.99

DAVID Lodge is unusual in combining an interest in the Theory of Fiction with its successful practice. Most novelists, I would guess, are soon confused or bored by Literary Theory. It doesn’t seem to have anything really to do with the way they write novels or the problems they encounter. These are usually simply stated, if not resolved: what do I make him/her do/say next? How do I get from here to there? How do I make this ring true? That sort of thing.

At the same time, most of the academics who pontificate about the Theory of the Novel are no more capable of writing a readable one themselves than of winning the Open golf championship. Lodge can do both. He is very clever and his novels are rather good. It’s a rare double act.

The cover of this book suggests that we are going to be offered a sustained argument. The cover is deceptive. What we have is a collection of lectures (the text amended and extended) and essays, delivered or published in various places for diverse purposes. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed some, perhaps most, readers will be relieved and pleased to discover that the most interesting and entertaining of them are really no more demanding than good old-fashioned book chat: "Dickens Our Contemporary"; "Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece", Howard’s End that is; "Waugh’s Comic Wasteland"; "Lives in Letters: Kingsley and Martin Amis"; "Henry James in the Movies"; "Bye-Bye Bech?"; "Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor".

The Dickens is OK. The Forster makes as good a case for that overrated novelist as can be made. The Amis and Henry James essays are admirable, alert, humane, intelligent and very sympathetic. The Bech - that is, Updike - and Roth ones both suffer from being adulatory rather than critical. The Bech stories are very minor and distinctly tiresome Updike, thin to vanishing point. And Roth? Even more overrated than Forster, to my mind, and every bit as dreary. For my money, the only thing Roth scores high on is self-pity, which Anthony Powell once identified as "in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller", a very acute observation.

As for the title - "Consciousness and the Novel" - part of Lodge’s argument is occupied with the debate among scientists as to whether "the self is an immaterial essence" or "an epiphenomenon of brain activity".

This is doubtless an absorbing question, but not one that can have much to say to the novelist, of interest indeed only in the way that Lodge himself explores it in his novel Thinks, which has at its centre an affair between a cognitive scientist and a literary novelist. But, since the essence of drama is that the characters must have a choice, or at least be thought and felt to have a choice, a novelist must surely grant them a sufficient degree of free will to make this possible, however limited by circumstance, inherited or acquired assumptions etc, it may be.

The interesting problem for the novelist is how to render his characters’ consciousness in a manner that will seem convincing to the reader. He has to start by conceding that any such rendering is artificial, Joyce’s "stream of consciousness" being every bit as "unreal" as, say, Trollope’s exposition of the private thoughts and feelings of his characters . And consciousness can be revealed even when the author declines to enter the minds of his characters or at least to admit the reader there - think, for example, of some of Hemingway’s short stories, like the marvellous and disturbing Hills Like White Elephants .

It’s one of David Lodge’s many merits that he invites the craftsman, being one himself, to think seriously about the practice of his craft.