Captain Haddock and the Mysterians (Thinks... - David Lodge)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Thinks... - David Lodge
Date:	08/11/01 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of lovely ellipses...

Disadvantages: No real drama.

My thoughts on Thinks... I think therefore ohmigod did I turn off the gas?
This is a book about thinking - try saying that when your fist as a part!
A stream of incontinence, a verbal disgression area, and sex, of course -
every few seconds every man thinks of sex.

The cover's great, my third favourite of the year (after Fury and Oxygen),
it reminds me of the cover of an Edward de Bono book, which one though? The one about the six thinking hats? An anagram of hats perhaps?
No - not this novel, this novel's novel. Can't stop thinking about sex though.
[Insert something interesting here.]

A campus novel set at the University of Gloucester. Dr. Foster? No, Ralph Messenger, director of cognitive science, nearly fifty, must have more sex before it's too late. Talking of sex there's Helen Reed, a novelist standing
in for the writer-in-residence: teaching creative writing. Those that can do can't teach, can they? (There's always a novelist isn't there - novelists can't stop writing novels about novelists writing novels about novelists, can they?)

Messenger is trying to capture his thoughts by speaking them into a tape recorder. Luckily the interior monologue gimmick can't be sustained for long, so the novel is split between his thoughts and Helen's journal. Will they? Won't they? Will they join the dance? (The dance called The Shag that is.)

On one level then, this is just a book about a scientist lusting after a recently widowed writer. (Helen's hubby has died from a brain haemorrhage).
Lodge does also provide plenty of food for thought about thought though. This really is a cerebral novel.

We all want to know what's going on inside other people's heads, so the juxtaposition of a scientist investigating thought with an author whose work involves having to imagine herself into her characters' heads is interesting.
She takes t
he thought experiments in cognitive science he explains to her
and uses them as the basis for creative writing assignments for her students.

Lots of concepts are described in passing. Like the Prisoner's Dilemma - whether to co-operate or defect. Share or Shaft. (Did you see Kilroy-Silk's new quiz show by the way? What a stinker! Anne Robinson has nothing to fear there.) And what is it like to be a bat - can a human being imagine that?
Did I just juxtapose Anne Robinson and a bat deliberately or subconsciously? Who can say? Not you. Maybe even I don't know. Some people believe that consciousness can never be explained, apparently they're called mysterians. (In case you were wondering, Captain Haddock is Messenger's e-mail server - all the computers in his lab are named after characters from Tin-Tin y'see.)

But can a bloke, thinking about sex every 3.1 seconds, think like a woman? Can David Lodge convincingly express the thoughts of a female character?
That's something else to think about. And how would I know, I'm a man.
Does Helen Reed's journal read like the words of a woman, or a man trying
to think like a woman? I'm not sure, but I thought it unlikely that a woman would forget the name of the male star of the film Ghost. Even I know that.

But any book that tries to bridge the gulf between literature and science should be applauded as far as I'm concerned. (Unlike Newsnight Review last week, in which Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin, reviewing Stephen Hawking's
new book, did the old 'oh dear, I can't possibly understand nerdy science' routine.) Thinks.. is also the second book I've read this week to tell me that
Charles Darwin suffered from boils and flatulence. And piles too, apparently.
That's got to be synchronicity, hasn't it? Sting was on Parkinson as well,
so if this op gets pushed off the front page by one on Carl J
ung that will
prove there must be a God... and therefore that He doesn't exist. Q.E.D.

I'll certainly be reading some more of David Lodge's books.
Not just because this was good, but also to find out if he ever writes about anything else but sexually-obsessed middle-aged men from academia...


¶ Hardback: £16.99 ¶ pp 342 ¶ ISBN: 0436445026 ¶
¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ pp 352 ¶ ISBN: 014100021X ¶ 2nd May 2002 ¶
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