ABSTRACT
Our conversation took place in the book-lined but high-tech study of David
Lodge's house in a quiet, leafy, suburban street not far from the campus of
Birmingham University where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he gave
up teaching to become a full-time writer, and where he is now Honorary
known each other too long and too well to set up a formal interview, and that
we would feel more at ease in a relaxed conversation which ranged over his work and ideas. Nevertheless, I knew the points I wanted to put to him; in particular, I wanted to explore the sense in which Lodge could still be called a
'Catholic novelist'. He is best known as a writer of comic and inventive campus fiction, in particular for a sequence of novels with recurring academic
characters and settings: Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice
Work (1988). His early novels, though, were conspicuously Catholic in their
subjects and themes. The Picturegoers (1960) was a study of lower
middle-class Catholic family life in South London, while The British Museum
is Falling Down (1966) drew fine wry comedy out of the ban on contraception.
