Ginger, You're Barmy - David Lodge

This is a reissue of Lodge's 1962 novel based on his own National Service. The point, as in fiction by many other reluctant recruits, is that National Service was pointless and boring. Problem is, pointless and boring doesn't make for winning fiction.  Lodge gets round this by cleverly compressing the action into the beginning and end of his avatar Jonathan's two-year stint. Everything between, he implies, is the boring stuff we don't need to bother with.

He freely admits to borrowing the device from Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Indeed, his 1982 afterword is, for once, useful and informative.  By 'for once' I don't mean to slight Lodge but to scorn the practice of publishers who tend to think that they have to add something extra to reissued novels for the benefit, presumably, of the hard of thinking. Anyway, in this instance it does add value.

Rather than make himself the rebellious character - another typical problem of the sub-genre - Lodge's Jonathan is the pragmatic one who gets on with it and makes the best of a bad job.  The rebel here is the ginger Irishman, Mike Brady, who is simply one of nature's nonconformists.  Brady goes completely off the rails when the bullying victim that always exists in any bunch of confined young men, dies.  He attacks the bully and pays the price.  He thus leaves the novel about two-thirds of the way through.  Big problem, we might assume, leaving us with the boring plodder Jonathan Browne.  Even as a fledgling author, however, Lodge had the skills to stave off disaster.  We already know that he is courting Brady's girlfriend - another benefit of the flashback structure - so our interest now centres on how this came to be.  Is he really making his narrator a bit of a shit?  No he isn't, and the courtship is touchingly handled.  Then, towards the end, Brady naturally resurfaces, now a member of a quite different army.

Ginger is, of course, a proper English comic novel.  Which is not say it is funny or - as the guff on the cover seems to suggest, farcical - but simply that it views its world and those who inhabit with good humour and general positivity.  There are smiles rather than laughs.  Lodge is too good at characterisation to waste time on jokes.  The book is lean - two hundred or so pages - yet there is considerable depth and disquisition. Interestingly, it is Lodge's only first-person narration (at least it was in 1982).  He seems to suggest this is a weakness but I consider it a great blessing.  The beauty of a narrator is that you have no choice but to enter his or her world because it's the only one on offer.  You don't have to like him but you can't be allowed to loathe him.  Mike Brady, without Jonathan's explanation of his shortcomings, might be insufferable.  As it is, we share Jonathan's fascination with him.

I have read of lot of Lodge over the years.  On the whole I prefer his early work.  I thoroughly enjoyed this.