Lodge traces “epiphany” from its Christian origin—the showing of Christ to the Magi—to Joyce’s secular adaptation of the term: the moment a commonplace event is transformed into timeless beauty. In Modern fiction, epiphany often replaces decisive action as the source of climax, as in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

In one of the examples Lodge chooses to illustrate epiphany, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the protagonist of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), stands at a golf tee beside the local minister Eccles, who has been badgering him throughout a poor round about what intangible “thing” is absent from his marriage. Rabbit, a young man trapped in a dead-end job and an emotionally exhausted marriage, grows angry at the questions. He swings and strikes a perfect drive, constituting an epiphanic moment.

Updike’s passage moves from literal description—the golf swing is described step by step—into metaphor. Rabbit’s cry of “That’s it!” answers Eccles’s question about his marriage and also contains the realization that an escape, like that of the golf ball, is the only way out. Further, the language’s suggestions of religious transcendence ironically comment on Eccles’s own lack of genuine faith.

Lodge now turns to the narrative element of coincidence, using an excerpt from Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) to show the balance between artifice and plausible randomness. In the passage, Lambert Strether, an elderly American bachelor, observes what appears to be an idyllic couple in a rowboat at a French countryside inn. He reads them as seasoned, frequent visitors. When the woman’s parasol shifts and the boat wavers, Strether suddenly recognizes her and realizes that the man is Chad—a meeting that the text itself calls “a chance in a million” (149).

As this passage shows, coincidence is a trade-off between structural pattern and plausible randomness. Victorian novelists exploited it heavily, particularly in “nemesis” plots. In The Ambassadors, Strether has been sent to Paris by his patroness Mrs. Newsome to retrieve her son Chad from a supposedly improper liaison with the aristocratic Mme de Vionnet. Trusting Chad’s denials, Strether has sided with him. The riverside encounter proves that Chad and Mme de Vionnet are lovers, bitterly disillusioning Strether and confirming New England’s suspicions of European culture.

Lodge then examines how he uses coincidence varyingly in his own work. Lodge’s farcical comic novel Small World accumulates coincidences freely—an airline employee, Cheryl Summerbee, improbably produces the exact book that the hero Persse McGarrigle needs to locate the heroine, Angelica. The realistic Nice Work is more restrained in its use of coincidence: The heroine Robyn Penrose resolves a workplace disruption by recognizing the intruding Kissogram performer as her student Marion Russell, a connection made credible by earlier planted hints.

Lodge defines the unreliable narrator as an invented character who participates in the story they tell. The device exposes the gap between appearance and reality—not through malice but through ingrained self-deception. An excerpt from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) shows the effects of the unreliable narrator. In the passage, the butler Stevens receives news from the housekeeper Miss Kenton that her aunt has died. He grants her the day off, exits, and only then realizes that he has offered no condolences. He lingers in the corridor but decides against returning, fearing he would intrude on her grief. The thought that she might be crying produces in him a feeling he can only describe as “strange.” When Stevens next finds occasion to comfort Miss Kenton, he instead criticizes her management of new maids. Pages later, he admits that he has placed a key memory in the wrong episode: Miss Kenton was crying not after her aunt’s death but on the evening Stevens coldly rejected her unambiguous offer of love.

Lodge contrasts Stevens with Charles Kinbote, the delusional scholar-narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), who believes himself the exiled king of a country called Zembla. Where Kinbote is eloquent and comically grandiose, Stevens’s unreliability is embedded in his incapacity to name his own feelings.

Lodge notes that a consequence of imperialism has been a dominance of “exotic” settings in British and American novels of the last 150 years. He clarifies that exotic in this context simply means “foreign” rather than glamorous. Further, the exotic in fiction, he argues, is the mediation of a foreign setting to a domestic audience. An example of this mediation is Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948). In the quoted passage, Wilson, a newly arrived Englishman, sits on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel on a Sunday morning. He watches African schoolgirls across the street trying to wave their hair, clerks moving toward the church, and a vulture settling on the corrugated-iron roof above him. Wilson feels almost intolerably alone.

To mediate the foreign setting for its audience, Greene’s opening deliberately withholds the location—Freetown, Sierra Leone—and scatters English signifiers: Bedford Hotel, Bond Street, Cathedral. The exotic details emerge gradually. Wilson is a minor character used solely to introduce the setting before the narrative shifts to the long-serving police officer Scobie. Lodge argues that this double-take also captures colonialism’s tendency to impose its own culture on indigenous ones.

Lodge also discusses the influence of Joseph Conrad, a master of the “imperial” narrative, on Greene. Conrad often uses his narratives to deconstruct the myth of the “civilizing” colonial mission. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the narrator Marlow frames his Congo story from the Thames and inverts the categories of “savage” and “civilized.”

In a departure from pattern so far, Lodge uses not one or two but five textual examples to open the chapter: a plot-summary heading from Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), a self-conscious arbitrary chapter break from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a verse epigraph from Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), a literary epigraph from Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) at the head of Eliot’s Middlemarch, and an asterisk break in Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904) that leaps from a character’s home to a railway station without narrating the journey. Lodge uses the passages quoted to show that chapter divisions serve a useful and particular purpose in novels. The importance of chapter divisions can be understood if one reads the novels of Daniel Defoe, often structured as a continuous, unbroken discourse. Reading these unbroken narratives makes one appreciate novels where breaks serve to pause the narrative, mark transitions, and heighten suspense. Further, novelists use chapter breaks to varying effects, as evident in the passages quoted. Smollett’s headings work as plot trailers; Sterne’s self-referential interruption exposes compositional mechanics for comic effect. The “Old Song” at the head of The Heart of Midlothian connects the plight of Effie Deans—the heroine Jeannie’s sister, accused of murdering her child born out of wedlock—to the tradition of deserted women. Eliot adopted the practice to signal intellectual authority; Kipling went further by inventing apocryphal epigraphs.

Victorian publishing formats—three-volume novels and serial installments—also shaped chapter length. Fielding’s Tom Jones represents deliberate symmetry: 198 chapters in 18 books. Lodge reviews his own practice across The Picturegoers (no chapters), The British Museum Is Falling Down (parodic headings), and Changing Places and How Far Can You Go? (verbally patterned part titles), concluding that semantic symmetry matters more to writers than readers consciously recognize.

As a specific subset of the possibility of dialogue in novels, Lodge focuses on the telephone as a literary device. He argues that the telephone’s inability to transmit visual or physical cues (Lodge’s own narrative prefigures smart phones and the age of video calls) makes it a powerful narrative instrument for deception and misunderstanding. Novelists such as Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, and Ivy Compton-Burnett—writing in the first half of the 20th century—were drawn to the expressive possibilities of surface dialogue offered by the telephone.

A passage from Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) presents two phone calls. Tony Last dials his wife Brenda’s apartment and greets the answering voice with “Darling,” only to reach an unidentified third party who relays that Brenda has gone to bed. Tony, drunk, insists on speaking to her; the caller hangs up. The scene then reveals that the caller is John Beaver, Brenda’s lover, who’s with her in the apartment. Brenda registers mild guilt but concludes that Tony brought the situation on himself. The phone rings again; Brenda answers and covers for Beaver, stating, “I left a message from where I was dining” (169).

The plot context further explains the surface deception at work: Brenda has been conducting an affair with the penniless Beaver while claiming to study economics in London. Tony, arriving in town unexpectedly, drowns his disappointment by drinking at his club with a friend before calling. The delayed revelation that Beaver was the anonymous caller fuses comedy and callousness in a single sentence. Lodge ends the chapter by citing Nicholson Baker’s Vox (1992)—a novel consisting entirely of a telephone sex conversation—as the logical extreme of the device.

Surrealism evolved from Dadaist experiments in the 1920s and 1930s, and its visual practitioners included Dalí, Duchamp, Magritte, and Max Ernst. Unlike magical realism, which maintains tension between the real and the impossible, surrealism dissolves that boundary entirely, making metaphors literal—as in dreaming. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is identified as the first major surrealist novel in English.

While surrealism is seen as a movement primarily explored by the visual arts, Lodge shows how the term itself was coined by the poet André Breton, prefiguring the expressive possibilities of surrealism in literature. The recent rediscovery of the writings of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington highlights the potential of surrealistic writing. In an excerpt from Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974), the narrator is stabbed with a knife, leaps into a boiling pot, and stiffens alongside a carrot and two onions. After a great crash, she stands outside the pot stirring a stew that now contains her own submerged body. She seasons it, finds it adequate, and then looks into a polished obsidian mirror and sees the Abbess of Santa Barbara de Tartarus, the Queen Bee, and finally her own face. The juxtaposition of the ordinary image—cooking soup—with its nightmarish possibility—the soup is her own body—marks this as a classic surrealist passage.

Carrington, a British artist who lived in pre-war Paris before settling in Mexico, worked equally in paint and prose, anticipating Postmodernist writers such as Angela Carter. Her novel’s 90-year-old narrator, Marion Leatherby, uses a hearing trumpet given by her friend Carmella to overhear her son Galahad and daughter-in-law Muriel planning to commit her to a psychiatric hospital. The story grows increasingly fantastic, culminating in a neo-pagan revision of the Grail legend. The excerpt’s humor—calmly seasoning one’s own boiling body—is essential: Without wit, the essayist argues, surrealism risks becoming emptily self-indulgent.

Lodge uses an excerpt from Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) to depict irony, which he describes as saying the opposite of what is meant or inviting a divergent interpretation. The passage depicts an embrace in London lodgings between Gerald Scales, a vain commercial traveler who has recently inherited a small fortune, and Sophia, the naive draper’s daughter who has eloped with him. The embrace highlights the difference between Gerald’s intent and Sophia’s naïve interpretation of them. Gerald’s thoughts run on self-congratulation, while Sophia’s run on vulnerability and attachment. When Sophia murmurs, “I’ve got no one but you now” (178), hoping to endear herself, Gerald is inwardly chilled by the reminder of responsibility. He offers a vague smile, and Sophia finds it irresistible. The narrator remarks that a less innocent woman would have read it as a sign of his unreliability—“But Sophia had to learn” (178).

Dramatic irony is a specific kind of irony that arises when readers perceive a gap between facts and a character’s understanding of them. Bennett particularly uses dramatic irony in the second paragraph of the quoted passage, when an omniscient narrator steps forward to comment explicitly on Sophia’s naiveté and predict her disillusionment. The reader is positioned as a passive but well-informed observer, clearly able to see what Sophia herself cannot.

Lodge argues that illuminating human motivation is one of the novel’s primary gifts, even in the case of the Postmodernist novel, which argues that the self itself is a pastiche. Realist fiction presents motivation as “overdetermined”—any action stems from several simultaneous drives—unlike a folktale’s single-cause explanations. An excerpt from George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a case in point of how uncovering human motivation drives forward a novel’s plot. In the passage, Mrs. Vincy asks the doctor, Lydgate, to relay a health update about the ailing Mr. Featherstone to her husband. The narrator observes that simpler delivery methods apparently never occurred to Lydgate—from which readers may infer that he had no real objection to calling at the house when Mr. Vincy was away and encountering Rosamond Vincy. Lydgate mentally rehearses the visit as a casual, playful exchange signaling no serious intentions. Beneath this, unacknowledged speculation that Rosamond may have fallen in love with him has worked its way into his thinking.

Lydgate has been visiting the attractive but shallow Rosamond until her aunt Mrs. Bulstrode warns him that his attentions may appear as courtship. He stops for 10 days and then calls. Eliot’s roundabout narration—noting what “apparently did not occur” to Lydgate (182)—mimics both how people infer motives from behavior in life and how characters conceal true motives from themselves. The visit overturns Lydgate’s plan: Startled by his reappearance, Rosamond drops a piece of chainwork; he retrieves it and sees tears in her eyes, and within minutes, they’re engaged. The dropped chain, Lodge observes, has symbolically encircled Lydgate’s neck, mortgaging his professional future to an ill-fated marriage.