Persse McGarrigle is attending his first academic conference and is not enjoying it. Newly appointed to a tiny Irish university, he is keen to stretch his wings professionally and do some networking. But it all seems to be very disillusioning until he meets Angelica Pabst, a beautiful doctoral student, and is instantly smitten. However, the path to true love never runs smooth, not even in the very small world of literary academics…
Small World was David Lodge’s seventh novel. It is a sequel of sorts to 1975’s Changing Places, another university novel with a few of the same characters. Whereas Changing Places dealt with a relatively small cast of characters in two locations (the fictional city of Rummidge in the UK and the equally-fictional Euphoria State University in the US), Small World straddles the planet, with the Persse and the other protagonists constantly globe-trotting in pursuit of their dreams and desires.
It’s a novel that is soaked in themes and symbolism, filled with literary references and subplots stolen from all across literature, most obviously the body of work surrounding King Arthur. It’s also incredibly funny and bawdy, often in the most unexpected places.
The characters are equally interesting as well. Persse, as stated above, is pursuing his personal grail of Angelica; Philip Swallow and Maurice Zapp, the protagonists of Changing Places, are looking for academic success and personal happiness; Rodney Wainwright is an academic who spends most of the novel trying to forget about an affair he had with a student as well as writing a paper that he has to present; Fulvia Morgana is an Italian intellectual with some shady political links; Siegfried von Turpitz is a German professor cultivating a reputation of fear and intimidation across the academic world; Robin Dempsey is a rival to Swallow but finds his own career going sideways rather than forwards; Ronald Frobisher is a novelist suffering writer’s block brought about by technology and an endless number of questions about his novels from his Japanese translator; Desiree Zapp (Maurice’s ex-wife) is also suffering from writer’s block; Sybil Maiden spends her life wandering seemingly aimlessly from conference to conference; while Arthur Kingfisher is searching for the perfect candidate to take on a highly-paid, largely ceremonial academic position, while suffering from his own personal emptiness and impotence…
This is just a brief summary of the vast cast of characters and their situations found within the pages of this novel. As you can tell, the names are loaded with symbolism, as are the plots the characters engage in. But the real fun is finding them all popping up in each other’s stories as they travel from one academic engagement to another. Small world, indeed.
The common link in all these stories is, of course, Persse. Feverishly searching for Angelica, he encounters all sorts of obstacles, overcoming them with his kindness, native wit and a newly-minted credit card with which he finances much of his travelling. He does finally catch up with Angelica, only to be sent on another quest…
It’s an utter hoot. It helps if you have a working knowledge of literature and mythology to get most of the jokes and references in this book, but it is far from necessary: as with all the best stories, extra knowledge is a bonus but it’s possible to still get a tremendous amount out of this tale without it.
When I first read it I was 19 and in my first year of university. I picked it up and read the jacket flap and was intrigued by it. It was also quite cheap, so I took the plunge. I did not look back. The first chapter, in which Persse arrives at Rummidge and meets most of the other major characters was enough to convince me that this was going to be quite a bit of fun. The mix of high-brow and gutter humour was precisely up my alley, and the plot – featuring the most outrageous coincidences and unlikely meetings between the characters – was outrageous and entertaining enough not to strain my credulity.
The first paragraph of the prologue sets the scene. It features only two sentences: one is the setup, with the other one providing a rather good punchline:
When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered: when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts the in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.
There follows a brief description comparing those pilgrims of yore to the modern (the book was written in 1984 and set in 1979, so your mileage may vary as to “modern”). Then, after this fabulous introduction to natural world and modern pilgrimages, we get Persse looking out at the harsh weather around him from a vantage point of his poorly equipped lodgings, and opening the novel proper with…
“April is the cruelest month,” Persse McGarrigle quoted silently to himself…
It’s all rather clever and makes you feel smart having caught the juxtapositions between Chaucer and Eliot, so when you get a character trying to compose a dirty limerick just a couple of pages later, it does set the tone for the rest of the book.
I loved it: it was clever and, better still, it made me feel clever because the references it made were easy for me to check up on, thus enjoying the jokes even more.
A couple of years later, I managed to catch an adaptation of it on television and rather enjoyed that. It was quite faithful to the book but despite starring several actors that I admired, it didn’t feel like it had the same level of energy or wit that the novel had, although it was a lot of fun.
Eventually I also managed to read Changing Places, which I quite enjoyed. It offered a fair amount of context for some scenes in Small World, while being a fairly entertaining story in its own right. Some time after that, I managed to read the third novel in what became known as “The Campus Trilogy”; Nice Work, a slightly more serious novel about an academic who work shadows an industrialist in his factory, while he does the same in her workplace. It was a surprisingly good book that explored ideas like sexism in the workplace and how tenuous employment opportunities can make people either more ruthless or timid. All three of them were published in an omnibus edition and that made me reevaluate how I felt about Small World.
This is a fairly weird aside, but bear with me.
The three chapters that make up Part IV of Small World all begin with a sound effect. It’s the same sound effect written three different ways. Two instances of it are meant to emulate the sound of jet engines taking off and landing while the third is the sound of the wind in the reeds of Lough Gill, where Persse is leading a tourist expedition to The Lake Isle Of Innisfree, made famous by W. B. Yeats.
The effects read as follows:
whhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Part IV, Chapter 1
whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeee!
part IV, Chapter 2
And
whhheeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Part IV, Chapter 3
In my lovely hardback edition these effects are italicized in a very dignified manner (I abject myself before you, dear reader, and admit that I do not know the font’s name). It seemed hilarious that in a rather funny book that also touched on quite serious matters, we could also get moments of pure nonsense like these that broke the tension or mood a little. Each one took up less than a line so they could be done away with quite quickly.
In the paperback, however, the smaller size meant that the first one had to go over into the next line, and that line break in the paperback ruined the mood that the exact same effect had created in the hardback. It was also left in regular roman print rather than being italicized, which also ruined the effect because now the sound effect just looked like someone had spilled some letters onto the page.
At any rate, the next time I read the omnibus, I made sure that I read Small World in the hardback edition. I still do.
Like I said, a fairly weird aside.
Anyway, the major benefit of reading Small World was that it was great to read a novel about people who loved books and had managed to build a career out of reading books. Being an academic himself, Lodge was a bit cynical about the whole “academic career” side of things – as evidenced by Maurice Zapp producing a single highly flexible paper that he plans to deliver at conferences across the globe, with slight changes made for every angle that each conference is exploring – but the wonderful conversations and references that pepper the story showed that this was a viable option for a hobby, even if you couldn’t make a living out of it yourself.
For myself, I was at an age where I was quite self-conscious about comparing what I was reading to what other folks were reading, so Small World was a great boost to my confidence as it raised the possibility that it was their meaning that made books important rather than their genre. It would be another couple of years before I stopped worrying about what other people thought at all, which was an idea further encouraged by the fact that a lot of the folks who sneered at my literary tastes almost never read a book themselves) and just began to cultivate my own tastes without fear of public opinion.
Like Persse, my journey goes on…
You can find out more about David Lodge at https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/david-lodge
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