Lodge sets up a neat tension in the novel between the analytical literary world of Robyn, who doesn't believe that anything exists beyond text, and the bottom-line-conscious world of Vic, where only real things matter.

AND Lodge is not above taking himself apart in the same way from time to time. As he flits between styles, voices and tenses, Lodge constantly points out the deficiencies of the novel while steadfastly sticking to its conceits. Introducing Robyn, he describes her as:

...a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favorite phrase of her own) Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that "character" is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.

This type of self-criticism and analysis will be familiar to readers of Small World and Changing Places, as will the characters of Phillip Swallow and Morris Zapp, who both play cameo roles here.

But Nice Work covers new ground, particularly in its analysis of Thatcherite Britain in relation to the Victorian industrial era. It is just as consciously literary as either of the first two, but it has a firmer grounding in the contemporary social and economic problems of modern-day Britain.

Industry is finding it ever harder to compete with Europe and the Far West. And without anything real to support it, the university system is falling apart from lack of funds--Robyn can't even get a permanent job.

The world of academia, from which the previous novels rarely strayed, is on a collisiion course with reality in Nice Work. It is to Lodge's credit that he can see the reality so clearly from such a literary standpoint. And vice versa.