And the one area that eludes these relentless pot-holers of the mind is qualia – the ways we experience the world, tasting an apple, noting the colour of a primrose, feeling nostalgia. Science has yet to establish how the essence of functioning humanity works

David Lodge’s new novel, Thinks… highlights a word hitherto buried in the dusty shelves of philosophical logic: “qualia”. It simply means “the qualities or properties of something” but it is, in a sense, the hero of the book Thinks… (Secker & Warburg, £15.99) is set in the (still fictional) University of Gloucester, where the Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science is at the cutting edge of research into Artificial Intelligence.

Under its charismatic director, Ralph Messenger, it is dedicated to exploring the phenomenon of consciousness and brain activity. And the one area that eludes these relentless pot-holers of the mind is qualia – the ways we experience the world, tasting an apple, noting the colour of a primrose, feeling nostalgia. Science has yet to establish how the essence of functioning humanity works.
The qualia of David Lodge’s considerable output also transcend the sum of its parts. You could, at various times, have called him an exponent of the campus novel, the comic novel, the Catholic novel and the concept novel, but no term would have sufficed He has always liked to mix things up. His work combines accessible social realism with cunning metafictional games, parodies and literary debate. His long-standing interest in the impulse to religious belief combines with his chronic fascination with his characters’ sex lives.And the magisterial, university-professor streak that presents his readers with ad hoc lecturettes (such as Robyn’s brilliant deconstruction of a Silk Cut ad in Nice Work) hides an earthiness that’s anything but academic.

Like his alter ego Philip Swallow, who sits in the American morning sunshine in Changing Places and revels in the smell of sex on his fingers, Lodge is as happy in the mire of human veins as in the laboratory of the novel of ideas.Meeting him at his cool London pied à terre, in the heart of the West End, you’re struck by his dark eyes, the razor slit of his mouth, the faint air of melancholy, the touch of impatience in his speech. Though essentially a comic writer (spurred into comedy by the late Malcolm Bradbury after the two men “lived in each other’s pockets for two or three years” and wrote revue sketches for Birmingham Rep), he’s a serious thinker, who likes to engage with ideas at ahigh level. Though retired from a professorship of English at Birmingham, his speech is peppered with tutorial locutions as he describes immersion in science.”My interest in this started back in 1994. Literature as the basic discourse of intellectuals had become terribly academic and jargonised Literary criticism had become very arid. But there was a sudden wave of extraordinarily good popular science writing.