Changing Places
Several of Lodge's novels satirise the academic world. The Campus Trilogy ("Changing Places", "Small World" and "Nice Work") are set at a fictional English Midland university of "Rummidge", modelled on Birmingham. The novels share characters, notably the Rummidge English literature lecturer Philip Swallow and his American counterpart, Professor Morris Zapp, who aspires to be "the highest paid teacher of Humanities in the world". Swallow and Zapp first cross paths in "Changing Places", where they swap jobs for an exchange scheme (and later, swap wives). Lodge has called the plot of the novel "a narrative transformation of the thematic material and the socio-cultural similarities and differences I had perceived between Birmingham and Berkeley," during his visiting professorship.