While we didn't find Changing Places a laugh-out-loud tour de force as hoped, members certainly did enjoy this farce, which is the first book in a trilogy about campus life by David Lodge.
Written in the 1970s but set in 1969 the book is the story of two professors, an Englishman and an American, who take up each other's place at their respective universities. They take up a great deal more than this as the story unfolds. Members found the plot entertaining as it brought back memories of university life.
Apart from the main characters' viewpoints, the author employs a number of different ways to relate the events, using newspaper articles, advertisements, letters, telegrams and film scripts, to heighten the humour.
The author's own career as an English professor shows itself in the published American professor's research specialty - Jane Austen - and the book is lightly seasoned with Jane Austen references, some of them hilarious. The ending was suitably unresolved, to encourage readers to pick up the second book in the trilogy.
All in all an entertaining read.
Who is David Lodge?
David Lodge is an English author and literary critic who was a professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham until 1987.
He is best known for the Campus Trilogy: Changing Places: A tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988).
Both Small World and Nice Work were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written television screenplays and three stage plays.
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