Word: robyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WHICH subject just so happens to be the specialty of Robyn Penrose, a radical feminist scholar who has a temporary teaching post at Rummidge...
Despite her field of expertise, Robyn doesn't know the first thing about industry. At one point, when touring a factory, Robyn has to ask Vic what a foundry is. And when she arrives at the factory for the first time, she naively expects it to be something out of a Victorian novel; "Where are the chimneys?" she asks...
Reading Nice Work simply for the story is a waste of time. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional. After introducing Vic and Robyn in the first section of the book, Lodge simply turns them loose--they almost automatically begin to lose their disrespect for one another, become friends and wind...
...this point Lodge simply pulls an ending out of a hat--every one gets saved. The novel simply falls back on what Robyn describes as the standard solutions of the Victorian novelist: legacy, marriage, emigration and death...
Bright as its comedy is, Nice Work takes place within a sort of psychological smog spread by England's economy. All the characters, whether they know it or not, are indirect victims of Thatcherism -- Robyn because of the cuts in public spending that have ravaged her university's budget; Vic because of Rummidge's desperate rust-belt competition, which causes his firm to be taken over and him to get the sack; even Robyn's lover Charles because of the post-Big Bang financial speculations that lure him from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily...