Two short novels I read recently on rainy days and there have been plenty of those: The Tap Dancer, Andrew Barrow, 1992; The British Museum is Falling Down, David Lodge, 1965.
To digress, as it was raining again all day yesterday and Bertie was asleep on a sofa I watched Saltburn. The film takes its name from a fictional castle, the ancestral home of a Baronet and his dysfunctional family attended on by a butler and two footmen. The good looking son, Felix, befriends a scholarship boy in his Oxford college and asks him home . . . It’s a preposterous film – a Downton without any visible staff except the two silent footmen and the butler who seems to be based on the butler at Althorp in Charles Spencer’s unhappy childhood: Mr Betts “liked to walk quickly, his nose in the air, face clenched, his eyes fixed ahead, as if engaged in a never-ending egg and spoon race”. (A Very Private School, Charles Spencer, 2024) It is Brideshead and The Go-Between on acid evoking a fashion shoot for Vogue by Grace Coddington. It has some good acting by Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike among others and is a load of very enjoyable bollocks.
As far as I know The Tap Dancer is Andrew Barrow’s only novel and he waited until he was forty-seven to write it. It reads like an autobiography and I suspect that’s what it is. If you like observational humour in the style of The Diary of A Nobody and Alan Bennett, I do, you will find this very funny without actually laughing out loud.
David Lodge is a more seasoned comic author. I read his Changing Places decades ago. As a Professor of English Literature his novels also have an element of autobiography and, in The British Museum, parody other authors. But that’s not the point which is that it is a hugely funny farce in the vein of Luck Jim. But if you are interested in the parody, David Lodge elucidates in an Afterword.
”There are ten passages of parody or pastiche in the novel, mimicking (in alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, DH Lawrence, Fr. Rolfe, CP Snow, and Virginia Woolf.” He also notes that his original title, The British Museum Had Lost its Charm, was refused permission by the Gershwin Publishing Corporation. A pity as the novel describes A Foggy Day (in London Town).