Tuesday 15 June 2021

Books Read in May - Home Truths by David Lodge

David Lodge is a clever and amusing novelist. This novel is one he adapted from a play that was presented to good reviews and large audiences in a provincial theatre in Britain but not staged again thereafter. I hadn't thought about what a problem that might be for playwrights, and it seems rather brilliant of Lodge to decide to adapt the thing so that a wider audience could have access to it.

The adaptation works - Lodge created an entertaining novel from what must have been an entertaining play. It concerns one character who has given up being a writer and another who has kept going, becoming a script writer and part of celebrity culture. There is a slightly boring love triangle to hold the whole thing together. The end isn't perfect, but unfortunately that is true of 99 per cent of novels - and plays, come to think of it. Never mind, the book was enjoyable and I liked the justification the writer who has given up writing supplies for his decision, when how he could have stood giving up writing:

"You mean, how could I give up all those long, solitary hours spent staring at a blank page, or out of the window, gnawing the end of a ballpoint, trying to create something out of nothing, to will creatures with no previous existence into being, to give them names, parents, education, clothes, possessions ... having to decide whether they have blue eyes or brown, straight hair or curly hair or no hair - God, the tedium of it. And then the grinding, ball-breaking effort of forcing it all into words - fresh-seeming words, words that don't sound as if you bought them second-hand as a job lot .. And then having to set the characters moving, behaving, interacting with each other in ways that will seem simultaneously interesting, plausible, surprising, funny and moving ... It's like playing chess in three dimensions ... It's absolute hell."

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