Changing Places by David Lodge - the campus novel in full flight

The first of David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy is formally daring and filled with forgotten glamour from the early days of mass air travel

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … ” David Lodge’s 1975 tale of transatlantic donswapping, Changing Places, carries a Dickensian subtitle – A Tale of Two Campuses – that hints at the revolutions set in motion by an academic exchange programme between the University of Rummidge and Euphoric State University in California.

It comes as no surprise that Lodge’s British scholars are keener for a move to the sun-drenched campus on the San Francisco Bay than their American colleagues for a transfer to his fictional redbrick loosely modelled on Birmingham. In the end, the academically unremarkable but securely tenured Philip Swallow – an idle underachiever in the mould of John Williams’ Stoner – takes off for six months to swap jobs with the prodigiously productive, high-flying American Morris Zapp, who only takes the job in order to delay his divorce from zealous feminist Desirée. The two professors settle into their alter-ego existences with relatively little turbulence: moving into each other’s houses, driving their cars, sleeping with their wives … Much like Malcolm Bradbury’s earlier Stepping Westward, the British academic’s journey to America is first and foremost one of sexual liberation.

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