Graham Coster

Had the Pentagon, back in the late Sixties, accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they came up with a blindingly simple solution: fill it with seats, and call it an airliner. Thus was the Boeing 747 born, and now David Lodge has written what may, in socio-historical terms, be the first post-Jumbo Jet novel. Just as Wordsworth and Ruskin in the last century predicted and fulminated against the social implications of the new railways’ capacity for moving hordes of people into somewhere like the Lake District, so a newer mass translation of the populace is behind Paradise News: nowadays the wide-bodied jet enables hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of us all of a sudden to be the other side of the world, and Lodge to beam a whole plane-load of people to Hawaii for a fortnight.

Everyone is agreed: it is the drummer who is most important. ‘No group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm of his was the whole backbone of the Pistols’ sound.’ Then you have the singer, the showman – who probably does the lyrics too; and the lead guitarist, who probably comes up with the music; not forgetting the manager, even, without whom there would he no gigs, hotel rooms or backstage Jack Daniels on the contract rider.’

‘I did not particularly like travel books,’ explains the rancorous writer-narrator in Paul Theroux’s recent novel My Secret History: ‘the form had fatal insufficiencies. It was usually geography, and potted history, and a kind of lifeless boasting about how far the writer had gone and what he ate.’ It’s a scattershot complaint, but well made all the same. You don’t want to read a travel book which presses upon you, perversely, how much time the author has spent sitting in a chair reading – in which the principal journey has been made by fingers flicking through a library’s card index. Nor should travel writing approximate to an Anneka Rice challenge, celebrating the fulfilment of an absurd logistical ultimatum through can-do heartiness and a wide-eyed winning smile; nor should it feel like having someone else’s endless holiday snaps forced on you with the tacit smugness of ‘I’ve been there, and you haven’t!’’

Apart from me and the man who talked about elves, everyone on the bus to Cheesefoot Head seemed pretty sensible. There was the London stringer for the big provincial daily; the girl from the local paper; the woman doing syndicated interviews for hospital radio; the man from Farmer’s Weekly and the woman from Crops magazine (Organ of the Seed-Growing Trade), and the man with the very large attaché case from a Japanese TV station.

Faking it is no good.

If you need caves, and there are no caves – if you’re shooting A Passage to India you need caves – then you need dynamite. If you need grass on the battlefield – in Heaven’s Gate there was to be grass on the battlefield, and at Kalispell, Montana there was no grass – then you need a comprehensive under-battlefield irrigation system.