David Lodge: Author, author

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

The challenge involved in novelising the life of Henry James is two-fold. First, James had the quietest of lives, and second, he was a genius.

The second of these difficulties does away with the first. If you can bring James the writer alive in readers' minds, giving them some sense of what it might be like to possess his astonishing powers, then the fact that he never climbed any mountains or broke any hearts is hardly going to matter.

But it isn't easy, portraying the inner workings of a mind far more powerful than your own, which may possibly be why David Lodge chooses not to bother.

The Henry James we meet in Lodge's novel is a rigidly uptight little man of no great insight, obsessed with personal privacy and driven by an apparently hopeless literary ambition.

Lodge invests a lot of energy in connecting the dots, joining various famous books and stories to events in the writer's life. But he conveys no sense at all of whatever it was in James that could turn life into art.

This book's other main flaw is that it rambles horribly. For much of the first 200 pages, we bounce randomly through a series of meetings with James' friends and associates, as though the plot structure has been rigidly determined by James' appointment diary.
It is apparent that fictionalising Henry James is a challenge beyond Lodge.

Lodge has for most of his writing career been the literary equivalent of one of those nomadic tribes that only ever hunts yaks, but has a use for every last hair and bit of gristle — Lodge's yak being the sexually repressed middle-class Catholic. Through 12 previous novels he's pursued this creature, devoting formidable energy and technique to analysing its culture and habits, with results ranging from the profound to the pathetic.

I've often wondered what Lodge might be capable of if he allowed himself a broader range of subject matter. Now, alas, I know.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer

* Secker & Warburg, $36.95