Thinks...
David LodgeSecker & Warburg, 2001, 342pp, £16.99
It’s a campus novel and it’s a good read, as ever with David Lodge. His fluid and deft narrative style always makes me wonder whether I can bother to read on after the first few pages, and then you get drawn into the layers of the thing. Although this book starts with nine pages of self-conscious stream of consciousness - he’s full of self-parody - and then settles down to more recognizable Lodge. But here we have more than just a well-written campus novel.
Thinks... is also a very stimulating and informative postmodern encounter with the self, under the guise of an incidental exploration of cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI). If you let it, the book has you staring into a literary mirror wondering who the person staring back at you really is, and whether your thoughts are hard-wired into your brain. And whether God is a virus.
Yes, there’s a good story, with bitchy university dons, and love affairs and lotharios and pushy wives and clever talk from High Table polymaths. (Although this is set in the fictional University of Gloucester in 1997 where there is no High Table, but a lot of characters very like the media dons on Channel 4 and Radio 4 .) But this is more than a story and certainly not a parable or extended metaphor. The quirky title, Thinks..., gives you a hint of your final destination.
Lodge admits that it was an article in The Tablet (John Cornwell’s ‘From Soul to Software’, June 1994) that set him off down the now well-worn trail of human identity, consciousness, language and brainworks. The trail may be well-worn, but the territory is still mostly uncharted. So it’s science, it’s philosophy and of course it’s theology - often Roman Catholic theology - not Lodge’s theology, but that of his characters. His ‘Acknowledgements’, at the back of the book, forms a ready bibliography of major publications on the trail in the 1990s. (I happened to be reading Ian M. Banks Look to Windward, his latest Culture novel (Orbit, 2000), while I was reading Lodge. The Culture presents another challenge to much Christian thinking on the role of machines, AI, and the hybridization of computer software and humans. And I am also reading the final part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, (Scholastic, 2000) which is a darkly creative approach to the human soul in the machine. And while I’m at it, I suppose I should commend my current ‘heavy’ reading, Fergus Kerr’s Immortal Longings (SPCK, 1997) which represents a philosophy of religion approach from the angle of transcendence and ‘what is human?.)
This is an enjoyable novel, full of different styles: narrative, parody (including Irvine Welsh), diary, email exchanges... and will get you hooked after the first couple of chapters. It might also send you off to find out more about human consciousness and more about the nature of human identity and how that fits in with our theology of eternal life.
Third Way
