Changing places in changing times
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'Changing Places' forms part of a trilogy of campus novels (along with 'Small World' and 'Nice Work') by the popular British author that are now available to purchase as an anthology. Reading all three books is further necessitated by the fact they share common characters. 'Changing Places' is about the transformative experience of living in an another culture (albeit ones not vastly dissimilar, in this case the UK and US) and the social transformations taking places at the tail end of the 60s. The plot conceit, as with 'Nice Work', is that two completely different people are displaced by an exchange programme foisted upon them by their employers. In this case, it involves a reserved British professor temporarily trading posts with a brash American academic.
While these characterisations are somewhat cliched, they are nonetheless written with an empirical astuteness of someone who recognises that most stereotypes have an element truth at their core. As with most of Lodge's novels, it is a compulsive read with attractively realised characters. Insightful, witty, and sometimes a little too symmetric in its plotting, his novels can be a little too neatly predictable. However, there is enough sex, humour and cutting social observation to sustain even the most cynical reader.
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Rumbustious... and rambunctious...
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Published in 1975, 'Changing Places' was the novel which allowed David Lodge to break through as one of the major novelists of the late twentieth century who are both serious and highly entertaining. It is also the first of his novels featuring the academics of the University of Rummidge, a city which Lodge, in an introductory Author's Note to his later novel 'Nice Work', wryly situates in "the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world".
The people changing places in 'Changing Places' are a Rummidge academic, Philip Swallow, and Professor Morris Zapp from Euphoria State University, USA. The novel is an uproarious satire of academic life in Britain and in the United States, with countless observations about how society was changing, both here and there, at the beginning of the 1970s.
The novel is also a fascinating experiment in different kinds of narrative, including one chapter consisting exclusively of personal correspondence, another of extracts from local newspapers, and a final chapter written as a film-script. It is superbly plotted, and more openly and deliberately farcical than Lodge's subsequent novels. Its main achievement is to be both a serious meditation on what a novel is/can be/should be, and an enormously entertaining lesson in relativism.
Read this one first, then go on to 'Small World' and 'Nice Work'. You'll be hooked on David Lodge for ever.
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Umberto Eco Rated this Book as the funniest novel ever
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The story takes place in 1969 as two professors, American Morris Zapp and Englishman Philip Swallow swap places at each other's universities. Swallow goes to Zapp's Euphoric State University (California, probably Berkeley) and Zapp goes to Swallow's University of Rummidge in England's Midlands, (probably Birmingham). In Changing Places David Lodge is an academic writing about academics. In the background students are revolting, feminism is beginning, US consumerism is rampaging and the prominent English welfare state is becoming more and more worn out. In the foreground the comparison of the two worlds of academe, English and American, becomes a microcosm for the two nations as a whole. The novel explores how the two professors (and their respective wives), become reciprocally aware of how much their life-style and their set of values, inside and outside the Academe, owe to what they progressively recognize as one's own and the other's national identity and character. Literary criticism too is a distinct feature of national identity: Zapp is a champion of specialization, while Swallow despises theory as something un-English. Swallow sees the Americans as being better off but not having a better life than the English. They are more cynical and he is uncomfortable with the way they place the pursuit of their own ends above nearly everything. Zapp sees England as gloomy, poor, shabby and boring, linked to welfare solidarity and unaware of the power of free enterprise, but he is impressed by family bonds, the warmth of human relationships and the survival of moral scruples. Neither side wins and no sterotypes are allowed since the narrator invites the reader to sit beside him and at his detached height judge by his own common sense. Common sense of course being a characteristic that the English value very highly. In Changing Places literature claims a social conscience, an ability to go beyond the surface of things, an ability even to be self-critical. Literature emerges as a form of discourse which wants to increase the reader's critical and literary competence. To emphasise this point Lodge uses a narrative technique that incorporates other forms of communication and exposes their weaknesses. Newspaper articles are shown to have a bogus claim to transparency. Film's claim to represent reality is shown to be limited. The use of the campus novel is in itself an intriguing facet of Englishness. It offers social analysis but confined to a small arena and can be located between high-brow and low-brow. The style is usually in the form of popular satire but because it often involves writers teaching writing at university it raises itself to a level of seriousness. Satire shows only the weak sides of a society to enhance a critical laughter but the novel's literary status is very high thanks to its sophisticated narrative technique and because an understanding of society's weak sides has been shown to us by the 'wise author' who keeps claiming the privileged social and moral role devised for him by F.R. Leavis. Ultimately the reader is only mildly challenged by the novel and is invited to share the view of the narrator. Overall the novel re-inforces the privileged position of literature, while it updates the traditional narrative techniques of the novel. In a foreword to the French translation of Changing places, Umberto Eco described it as the funniest novel of the 20th Century. I can only agree.
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Changing Places does just so hilariously!
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Changing Places was Lodge's first campus novel and arguably the best. When the Californian Morris Zapp the English Philip Swallow swap jobs for a semester thay swap everything about each other's lives, which obviously has hilarious consequences, but their very diifferent takes on the situation provide a thoughtful aspect to the book. This is not only about a situation but also about an era and is based on Lodge's real life experiences on an academic exchange. This lends an interesting edge to the book, however this is such a work of genius, you forget the critical aspect and just smile your way through. I would recommend this book, but beware of the academic aspect. If it is new to you this book will either be a confusion or a delightful insight!
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Was 1969 as much fun as Lodge makes it?
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I didn't exactly miss 1969 - I was born at the beginning of the year. But I wasn't terribly conscious of what was going on in the world around me. There are two big events of that year I feel cheated of experiencing - the Moon landing and the student revolution. Lodge's book is a satire on the latter event. It describes the progress of innocent British academic Philip Swallow through the campus uprising at Eurphoric State (really Berkeley, not Stanford as another reviewer mistakenly claimed). Meanwhile, his exchange partner, cynical American academic Morris Zapp, cuts a swathe through the campus at Rummidge (Birmingham). For those of us who never experienced 1969, the novel can be read as a marvellous evocation of those times. It is also very, very funny.
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