[In the following review, Angier offers praise for Therapy.]

I read most of Therapy on a train, hooting uncontrollably (me, not the train). It’s so gloriously accurate. “Slough will be the next station stop,” said the tannoy—and there it was, on page 58: “Rugby will be the next station stop.” “BR has taken to using this cumbersome phrase, ‘station stop’ lately, presumably to distinguish scheduled stops at stations from unscheduled ones in the middle of fields.”

We got to Paddington; “This train has terminated” wasn’t in the book, oddly enough, but the station was (about Euston): “the hoi polloi waiting for trains must sit on their luggage, or on the floor (since there are no seats in the vast marbled concourse.)” Not to mention the post office (“cordoned-off lanes like Airport Immigration”), or the city library, “a brutalist construction in untreated concrete, said by the Prince of Wales to resemble a municipal incinerating plant.”

Lodge is merciless about modern Britain—but there’s so much fun in the recognition. As his hero Laurence Passmore says, seeing himself in Kierkegaard’s “unhappiest man”: “This guy has my number alright: Why then am I grinning all over my face as I read?”

Therapy is a perfect Lodge trick. It seems absolutely modern—but is in fact ancient, or timeless; it seems a comedy—but is about the stuff of tragedy: love and betrayal, good and evil, guilt and sin.

Its hero, Tubby Passmore, is middle-aged and (now) middle-class. He has a successful career (as the writer of a television sitcom), successful children, a successful marriage (a platonic mistress and a wife “of tireless sexual appetite”).

So why is he so unhappy? Why is he having every therapy under the sun: physiotherapy, aromatherapy, psychotherapy (with Dr Alexandra Marples, called Marbles—“If she ever moves or retires, I’ll be able to say I’ve lost my Marbles”), Inversion Therapy (for his baldness: “hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head”)? Why, in particular, has he suddenly started to get terrible shooting pains in his knee? Because he has idiopathic chondromalacia, says his orthopedic consultant, Mr Nizar (“I call him Knees-R-Us”): “Patella chondromalacia means pain in the knee, and idiopathic means it’s peculiar to you, old boy.” Because, says his physiotherapist, he has Internal Derangement of the Knee: “IDK. I Don’t Know.”

Soon there is IDK everywhere, outside Tubby Passmore (“Dianagate, Camillagate … Internal Derangement of the Monarchy”) and especially, of course, in. He loses his wife and his mistress; he is in danger of losing his job and his mind. Then he starts to listen: to read Kierkegaard; and to remember. Especially to remember. “Somewhere, sometime,” he says, “I lost it, the knack of just living … How?” This—like the whole novel—seems casual, but is entirely serious. There was a moment in which love and goodness were betrayed, and something worldly and worthless chosen. Tubby sets out to find it, and put it right.

This may sound like psychotherapy, but it isn’t. It is much more like religion. And though Tubby isn’t religious—certainly not Catholic—his search leads him, like Kierkegaard, to religion, and even to Catholicism. So, like comedy and tragedy the modern and ancient worlds are connected, interpenetrated.

Therapy is a most accurate title; but it might just as accurately have been Pilgrimage. Or Writing—because that has been Tubby’s best therapy all along, and his pilgrimage; and because with love and religion it is the hidden, serious subject of this very funny book.

I’ve always wondered how David Lodge managed to write about religion and literature and still get on the bestseller lists, station bookstalls and television. Therapy has showed me, once again, why. Because, like Tubby, he's so light on his feet; because he sees and writes comedy and tragedy together, interpenetrated; because, simply, he’s so damn good.