‘It’s largely thanks to him that the British comic novel remains in good health’: David Lodge remembered by Jonathan Coe

‘My imagination,” David Lodge once wrote, “seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures and characters into contact and conflict”. He was talking specifically about the genesis of his “breakthrough novel”, Changing Places, which found so much comedy – broad and subtle, oblique and laugh-out-loud – in the contrast between British and American ways of academic life. But the words could apply to all of his work, and they help to explain why he excelled in a mode of distinctively British comedy that won him devoted fans not just in his own country but all over the US and continental Europe.

Changing Places was published at the high-water mark of the British postwar male comic novel. The ripples sent out by Lucky Jim 20 years earlier could still be felt, Evelyn Waugh’s novels were a recent memory, Wodehouse had only just died, Tom Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury (Lodge’s close friend) were high in the bestseller lists. To the dry sense of the ridiculous shared by these writers, Lodge added his lightly worn feelings of spiritual angst as an “agnostic Catholic” and a flexible approach to literary technique which came from his admiration for the great modernists. One of the reasons Changing Places still feels so fresh is the way it hops so expertly between literary modes, from letters to found texts, from third-person narration to film script: the work of a man who had read and digested his early 20th-century masters.

In Nice Work, his third book set in the fictional city of Rummidge, Lodge transcended satire on university life to produce one of the earliest and most insightful novels about the impact of Thatcherism on British industry. But then his gaze had always really been centred, not on the narrow confines of the academic world, but on the complex realities of human and social relations. There was always a warmth and a wry wisdom to his characterisations, which was reciprocated in the affection he won from his readers. I witnessed this myself, especially on the occasions when I was lucky enough to appear with him at French and German literary festivals, where he was usually the guest of honour and would always attract a bigger crowd than any of the other British writers.

Fundamentally he was a very serious person – to the occasional surprise of those who expect comic writers to turn up wearing a red nose and a revolving bow tie. This seriousness emerges most strongly in his 2008 novel Deaf Sentence: an extremely funny book in many ways, but one which does not end with the expected comic set-piece. Instead, we find a sombre chapter involving a visit to Auschwitz, undertaken by a hero who reflects: “I don’t think I have ever felt so pessimistic about the future of the human race.” There was only one big novel after that, almost as if Lodge had lost faith in the consolatory power of humour.

It’s largely thanks to him, however, that the British comic novel remains in such good health, whether in the work of Nina Stibbe, Nicola Barker or Nussaibah Younis. What these writers, and Lodge himself, seem to have in common might be summed up in a line from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s great anti-detective novel The Pledge: an awareness that “the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this Earth is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations”. It was precisely this eye for the absurd that made Lodge not just one of the funniest but – much more importantly – one of the most truthful of postwar British novelists.