Small World by David Lodge – A Book Review

David Lodge’s is a small world; the Japanese call it a narrow world. It is a world of conferences - literary conferences, conferees, professors, writers, critics, linguistic enthusiasts and geniuses, universities, educationists and once through this novel, one would wonder if there does exist a world beyond these universities and conferences; where do WE live then or is our existence a myth? And these so called guardians and critics of literature are not bound merely to their books and epics and poems and poets; they are also travelers  lovers, drinkers and for all that, a crazy lot too!

Persse McGarrigle is a conference virgin when we embark on this story, but by the end of it, he is spread, laid, banged and turned into a conference slut, if we can call him one, considering his rigorous globetrotting to attend and evade the miscellaneous conferences in search of Ms. Angelica Pabst, the most beautiful girl he has ever met, trying to finish her doctoral dissertation on Romance – how lovely! This is his disastrous, frustrating and comic journey around the world in search of the evasive girl who has played a prank on him and given him the skip, his true love because he believes in her and it. Persse is a virgin otherwise too, one of those who believe in keeping the sacred act reserved for the necessary suffering called marriage. But then the poor guy discovers that she isn’t so sacred for this sacred plunge as one fine day, rather night, discovers her in the cheap bars of Soho, not only stripping but likely to do much more and then again discovers otherwise; she wasn’t her, his Angelica after all. So imagine his plight when he finally finds her and plunges into bed and mounts and rides and rises to collapse, not once but thrice, and is exhausted and drained but still in love, only to find that the soft hills were not hers, the valleys were not hers and it was not she, Angelica; “Jassus”, Percy must have shouted out loud at the discovery of this disaster!

Persse and Angelica are of course not the only attendees at these conferences. There is Morris Zapp, the suave and witty university professor who is thoroughly proud of and so much in love with himself. I guffawed at one of the papers he presented on ‘The Interpretation of Text’. He has had a short romance with his friend Phillip Swallow’s wife, was deceivingly forced into a threesome by Fulvia Morgana, another professor and her husband, and now aspires and will marry Thelma Ringbaum, another professor’s wife. Is this book about infidelities, well this is just the beginning. Phillip Swallow, in turn has had limited fun with Morris Zapp’s wife, survived a plane crash, enticed Joy Simpson, wife of a fellow colleague who has been kind enough to give him shelter after the accident and is now ready to divorce his wife and family for the remembrance and life time reliving of that one passionate night. And here is Morris Zapp’s divorced wife, Desiree getting cosy in the sheets with Ronald Frobisher. Wow and there’s more!

Infidelity is just a part, you will marvel at the kind of coincidences Mr. Lodge has packed into this book. There are times, rather most of the times; you would scream “Oh, pleaseeee, spare me, that’s too much of a coincidence!”, but Persse McGarrigle will meet all the right people at the wrong places, bump into the wrong people at the right places, and of course the right people at the right places; all except Angelica of course! You will not complain though and love it nonetheless, at least I did! And not only Persse, but others too are magically placed together in flights and find each other rightfully in bars and restaurants, children lost 27 years ago find their parents when their old hitherto unknown father has just proposed to marry a girl his daughters’ age, messages left at the weirdest of places are gloriously discovered, a lost or rather runaway husband is found tragically when a boat is about to sink…and this…and that….

And embedded in this comic confusions and coincidences is literature, well thought of, well presented, giving a new dimension at the texts that we read, how we read them, register, perceive and form opinions about. This book is an easy read and God I have read it at leisure and enjoyed every bit of this witty novel. It came as a cool breeze of fresh air after having read ‘The Gathering’ and ‘As I Lay Dying’. Highly recommended if you desire a good laugh! Mr. David Lodge, I am definitely reading the next one!

P.S.: At a paper on the subject ‘The Function of Criticism’ presented by a few of our learned educationists and highly acclaimed laureates, Persse asked a simple yet very relevant question which silenced all the speakers. Look out for it.

This is a part of the oration of Dr.Morris Zapp on the presentation of his paper on ‘The Interpretation of Texts’ – Enjoy! (May seem offensive to some, but then that’s not me, it’s Morris Zapp or rather David Lodge).

“The classical tradition of striptease, however, which goes back to Salome’s dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives in a debased form in the dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl’s underwear, we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts, we want to see her buttocks, when we have seen her buttocks, we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends – but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not! The vagina remains hidden within the girls body shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this, several ladies in the audience noisily departed], it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice, we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty, gazing into the womb, we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning is vain; it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it, we should take pleasure in its teasing.”

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 9/10

David Lodge