David Lodge - A Man of Parts

Daily Express“Lodge has chosen well...” For all its many pleasures, though, A Man Of Parts never quite conceals the fact that it is the work of a great novelist coasting. If you want to know about the life and times of HG Wells, read his own Experiment In Autobiography...

Financial Times“Lodge is, I think rightly, cautious...” Lodge passes rather quickly over aspects of Wells’s politics which still remain controversial, such as the conflict between liberalism and the centralised utopia in his thought...

The Independent“Lodge has given us his Wells...” Lodge's depiction of Wells as cat-nip to pretty young girls is a little optimistic and any sense that Wells was a predator in matters of sex (he wasn't called Jaguar by West for nothing, surely) is played down...

Guardian“An excellent biofic...” Less grounded novelists would let their imagination run away with them but Lodge remains scrupulous and scholarly. With some subjects that would be a failing, but Wells's life is so extraordinary that it needs no embroidery...

The Spectator“It’s Lodge’s voice you hear, rather than HG’s...” The problem is that A Man of Parts is so like a biography — particularly given the imaginative-reconstruction school of novelistic biography that now seems to be everywhere — that it’s sometimes hard to see what it does as a novel...

Scotsman“This may be the best way of writing about Wells...” A Man of Parts is a hybrid, which is quite suitable because it is the life story of HG Wells, and Wells himself was a sort of hybrid: a novelist who came to despise the art of the novel and thought its message more important...

The Telegraph“Outrageously clunky and curiously engrossing...” Lodge has paved the way for a book that plunders from as well as engages with Wells’s two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934) and its coda of sexual history published as H G in Love after the death of all the women concerned...

Book Bag“He makes Katie Price look like one of the Waltons...” There is plenty of interesting insight into his involvement in the political movements of the early 1900s, but the subject matter that makes the reader's jaw drop deeper and deeper is his love life and how he managed to get away with it....