Thinks

(The link here is to the Hardback version but if you do decide to buy it, get the paperback)

This is so full of experimental forms that it becomes un-experimental (bearing in mind that David Lodge always tries to be "experimental"). One of his characters actually writes a book which he describes as so conventional amongst a slew of contemporay experimental fiction, that it could almost be described as experimental due to its rarity. The writing in this book is, where it is in the third person and therefore simply describing events, purely that. David Lodge has tried to remove all trace of any style which he might possess. It could be written by a machine (cf "nineteen-eighty-four"). However, despite this un-emotional approach (I once thought it could be described as a dearth of adjectives), the subject matter - cognitive science - is very interesting. There are images described in the book which are very vivid. Each of David Lodge's books has at least one character from previous books so that the entire fictional world is maintained. There is, however, no crossover of these links so the trail from the first book to the last is simply one-dimensional. As each individual books is often very complex, it is strange to see the simplicity of these links. Maybe there are other links which I don't pick up on. After all, Mr Lodge is an academic of much higher intellect than me.

By the way "Godel, Escher, Bach" is apparently now described as "The book that can't be described in adjectives".