Reading David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’ in difficult times
The campus novels of the British novelist, who died aged 89 earlier this month, are pressingly relevant even today
One of the first novels I read after moving to Birmingham in the UK in September last year was David Lodge’s Nice Work. Lodge’s eighth novel, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988; it lost to Peter Cary’s Oscar and Lucinda. (Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was shortlisted in the same year.) Though some parts Lodge’s novel might seem a little dated — such as a controversy in Cambridge over literary theory, or the effects of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies on industry and academia — others, as we shall see, are pressingly relevant even now. Are universities too inefficiently run, or too altruistic and obscure to have any relevance for the common citizen? Is industry doomed because of its obsession with profit and lack of humanism?

My move to Birmingham was the result of an offer to do a PhD in Media at Birmingham City University (BCU). Though I had applied for the research project, it was not without misgivings that I made the cross-continental transition. I had last been a student nearly a decade-and-a-half ago. Since then, I have worked as a journalist for 10 years and then as a journalism teacher at a private university on the outskirts of New Delhi. Did it make any sense to give up the comfortable status quo of middle-class professional life and plunge back into the uncertainties of being a student? That too in a different country. Did I have it in me to attend classes and submit to the rigours of academic research? Would I even like Birmingham?
Nearly six months into my course, I still don’t have answers to all the questions. However, I can say with some confidence that Birmingham has started to grow on me. Since the city is also a site for my research, I set about reading about it. And one of the first fictional books I read was Lodge’s campus novel. Besides Nice Work, Lodge wrote two other novels set on the campus of the fictional University of Rummridge — Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984). Having devoured the first one (which is actually the final instalment of the trilogy) over a weekend, I found the other two in the library. They left me a little cold. Perhaps their focus on stylistic and formal experimentation took something away from the power of their narrative. I did not seek out other works by Lodge. But the news of his death on 3 January 2025 made me return to my notes on Nice Work.

The two protagonists of Lodge’s novel are Dr Robyn Penrose, a young academic in her early thirties, and Vic Wilcox, an engineer and factory manager in his early fifties. They live in the same city, Rummridge, which Lodge describes in a note as “an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world”. But they are inhabitants of very different worlds. One might even say worlds that are essentially in contrast — or even in conflict — with each other.
Dr Penrose is a temporary professor of English literature at Rummidge University, a stand-in for the University of Birmingham. (Lodge taught English literature from 1960 to 1987 at the university, where he also earned a PhD in 1967.) She earned her PhD from Cambridge with a thesis on the industrial novel of the 19th century. Her father is also an academic, as is her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Charles. She lives in the world of ideas, reading and writing about feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva or fashionable post-structuralist theorists of the 1980s, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others. Her world is one of ideas, perhaps a bit isolated by the verdant campus of her university, perhaps a bit divorced from the world around her.
Vic Wilcox, on the other hand, is proudly a man of the world. An engineer by training, Wilcox has risen through the ranks of the corporate world to become the managing director of J Pringle and Sons Casting and General Engineering. He is married to Marjorie, a former typist whom Wilcox met at his first job. They have two sons and a daughter. They live in a comfortable five-bedroom suburban house, with four toilets. In the first chapter of the novel, Lodge uses the toilet as a symbol for Wilcox’s climb up the ladder of prosperity:
At Gran’s house, a back-to-back in Easton with an outside toilet, you didn’t go unless you really had to, especially in winter. Their own house in those days, a step up the social ladder from Gran’s, had its own indoor toilet, a dark narrow room off the half-landing that always niffed a bit, however much Salinav and Dettol his mother poured into the bowl. …Now he is the proud owner of four toilets… Probably as good an index of success as any.
Access to a hygienic toilet is as much a function of class as anything else.
The Wilcoxes read the business section of The Times and the Daily Mail, while Dr Penrose subscribes to The Guardian, skipping over the business pages and focussing on literature and arts reviews. These two very different individuals are forced to come together when the government announces a Shadow Scheme, which requires a university professor to shadow a corporate manager with the aim of finding out how there can be better synergy between academia and industry. Dr Penrose is chosen to shadow Wilcox, not only because of her position as the junior-most member of the faculty in her department, but also thanks to her research interest.
Class is, of course, key to appreciating Lodge’s novel. Class difference and its many contradictions. On the surface of it, Wilcox is the epitome of the Thatcher-loving, high-flying corporate executive. Besides his five-bedroom house, he has all the trappings of power — a private cabin at his factory, a private secretary, business class travel, and a Jaguar.
Dr Penrose, on the other hand, has a more precarious existence. With the university reeling from funding cuts, her temporary position is unlikely to be confirmed. The chances of getting a job somewhere else are also bleak. She drives her mother’s second-hand Renault, which, at times, refuses to start. And yet, at a different level, she has the security of family wealth — her father is a chair of something or the other in his department, and her brother works at an investment bank. She bought the house she lives in with a loan from her father. Wilcox, on the other hand, is struggling to balance the books of the factory, to make a profit so as to not lose his job. In some ways, Wilcox is in a far more precarious condition than Dr Penrose.

In an early chapter of Nice Work, Dr Penrose delivers an introductory lecture to the 19th-century industrial novel to her student. Moving eloquently through the novels of Dickens, Disraeli, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell, she arrives at the conclusion that the 19th-century novelists, despite their knowledge of the problems of the Industrial Revolution in England, did not provide solutions that in any way disturbed or even challenged the class hierarchies of their contemporary society:
The writers of the industrial novels were never able to resolve in fictional terms the ideological contradictions inherent in their own situation in society. At the very moment when they were writing about these problems, Marx and Engels were writing the seminal texts in which the political solutions were expounded. But the novelists had never heard of Marx and Engels — and if they had heard of them and their ideas, they would probably have recoiled in horror, perceiving the threat to their own privileged position.
The same charge could be levelled against Lodge. The crises in his novel — Dr Penrose’s tenure coming to an end and Wilcox losing his job — are resolved by a coincidence and a retreat into the privileges of class. Dr Penrose’s uncle leaves her a substantial amount (about £150,000) in his will, dying conveniently at the narrative juncture when things come to a head. The university also, quite conveniently, figures out a way to hire her. Without a job, Wilcox plans to start his own business — and who should invest in it, but Dr Penrose? From the money she has inherited. It is all a little too convenient to be convincing.
In his essay, The Silences of David Lodge (1988), literary scholar Terry Eagleton describes the campus or academic novel as a convenient compromise for a problem that has haunted British literature for much of the 20th century: “how ordinary social experience is to offer a fertile soil for fictional creation”. Eagleton argues that “the university has the glamour of the deviant and untypical, providing the novelist with a conveniently closed worlds marked by intellectual wrangling, political infighting and sexual intrigue.” At the same time, it is also “sufficiently continuous with the wider society to act as a microcosm of middle-class mores”. It is, thus, perfectly suitable as a kind of fiction “which equivocates between a satiric criticism of everyday middle-class life and an unshaken commitment to its fundamental values”.
While Eagleton’s arguments are irrefutable, one must also acknowledge that Lodge was working within the 20th-century tradition of the British comic novel. Several obituaries published since his death have highlighted how Lodge was a very serious person. The humour in his fiction was, then, a strategy. Reading his well-plotted comic campus novels, full of erudite references as well as gallows humour, at a time when campuses are under attack from all sides is, perhaps, a nostalgic self-indulgence.
Even within the 15 years, from the late-1960s to the early 1980s, that his trilogy spans, “academia goes from a place of optimism, innovation and possibility, to a place where students barely get by on their grants, while their professors long for days gone by when the international lecture circuit could fund a lifestyle of global travel,” writes British journalist and author Janice Hallett in a piece on Lodge for The Guardian. While it is unlikely that academia will recover many of its freedoms and ambitions in our poly-crisis-afflicted world, Lodge’s novels can serve the purpose of entertaining utopian fiction, providing hope where there is none.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a PhD student at Birmingham City University in the UK.