The last novel I lobbied for didn't even get on the Booker shortlist. And I was a judge that year. Lodge's latest comedy of campus manners revisits Malcolm Bradbury's 1975 novel The History Man. There she falls victim to a sexual predator from the artificial intelligence department, Ralph Messenger. Thinks . . .
Lodge plays wittily with the techniques of stream of consciousness.
The narrative dips, innovatively, into the email-epistolary mode. There are Bremnerish pastiches of the literary greats. And, inevitably, the gloomy Catholic skull pokes through the novel's comic skin. I'd like to think there is a tiny bit of me in him. Before he came to Gloucester, he was 10 years at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.