Our Book of the Month back in December 2005 was The Master by Colm Toibin, which was about the novelist Henry James. As a follow-up, and at the request of several Forum contributors, the choice for March 2006 is also about James! David Lodge’s novel begins in 1915, but is set mainly in the late nineteenth century at a time when James was going through a particularly difficult phase.

Author, Author considers James’s friendship with the Punch cartoonist George Du Maurier - the writer of Trilby (and grandfather of Daphne!). It also involves James’s friend and fellow-writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Inevitably most reviewers have drawn a good deal of attention to the fact that Lodge covers some of the same ground as both Toibin in The Master and Emma Tennant in Felony (oh dear, this is becoming like an ever-expanding jigsaw!). It must have been strange for Lodge to complete the first 20,000 words of his book, only to find out about Tennant’s work.

Apparently he pressed on with his task, then discovered that Toibin had written about similar subject matter! However this is part of the attraction for us, in a sense, because it facilitates exploration of the texts alongside each other.

Lodge is an academic as well as a writer of fiction, and has actually published a book of essays entitled Consciousness and the Novel. It must be a complex task to enter into the consciousness of another author, and to blend fact and fiction convincingly, but David Lodge has been very highly praised for this experimental novel.