Consciousness and the Novel, by David Lodge

A consciousness-raising study of the many minds of David Lodge

Craig Raine, in the interview that concludes this collection, asks if David Lodge thinks he has a distinctive style and if it could be parodied. Lodge does not know: "I think I'm rather a ventriloqual kind of novelist. I imitate a lot of different voices rather than having an obvious distinctive one of my own."

Lodge's fiction is famous for pastiches of other writers, but he could as easily be talking about his criticism. Consciousness and the Novel consists of recent lectures, essays, introductions and reviews, in which several Lodges emerge: the dapper professor lecturing on the latest fashionable ideas; the meticulous teacher outlining the fascination of Howards End; the impatient dilettante carelessly taking quotations from the web and video sleeves; and the chatty, urbane champion of Evelyn Waugh. By writing differently on each subject, be becomes a different writer for each – the most striking thing about this collection.

At one level, then, this is simply the latest "best of", showing Lodge's range as a critical impressionist. The blurb, however, makes the claim that the book is about how the latest theories of the mind help us to understand how the novel represents human consciousness. So Lodge is interested in literature and "consciousness studies": artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology and so forth. All this boils down to the question of how the brain is "hardwired" and how competing "software" programmes for, say, "identity" or "soul" are run on the biological system. But by writing in so many styles, Lodge presents a powerful argument against the new maps of consciousness proposed by trendy polemicists such as Steven Pinker.

Lodge is sceptical about the reduction of character and experience to crude scientific models, but his attack is gently arch and conciliatory rather than savage. For instance, under "consciousness" he finds this entry in the International Dictionary of Psychology (1989): "Nothing worth reading has been written about it." Lodge responds that the author was "dismissing the entire corpus of the world's literature".

This idea gives Lodge the opportunity to approach literature as a pre-science of consciousness, with the novel as "arguably man's most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time". It is a chance he does not fully seize; we get comments on all sorts of things – Graham Greene at the cinema, creative writing classes – entertaining, but tangential to what might have been a grand theme.

Some may be surprised to find that Lodge, who parodied critical theory so lovingly in Small World, has virtually given up reading it. Instead he offers some fine analysis of nuance and tone, which again alerts the reader to the numerous voices in his own writing. There are a dozen Lodges here for the price of one – quite a challenge for any theory of mind.

The reviewer's book 'The Forger's Shadow' is published by Picador