Customer Reviews

The British Museum Is Falling Down. David Lodge (Penguin Decades)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Frazzled, brainy, and distractable doctoral candidate Adam Appleby spends a day (among many) in the Reading Room of the British Museum. His wife is home with their young children. This clever, playful, and sweet novel contains in it parodies of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Kafka, Hemingway, Graham Greene, and others. (They're named in Lodge's introduction to the recent edition.) Written in 1965; one of Lodge's earliest novels.

This is Lodge's third novel and first comedy, written while he was a young lecturer on a fellowship in the U.S.; while it's much more narrow and not nearly as subtle as his later work, it's still pretty good. There's a good deal of slapstick but more pastiche and sly satire, and Lodge's ear for hilarious dialogue is very evident. The subject matter, however, is now rather outdated, as it concerns the trials and tribulations of a young English Catholic couple who can't quite bring themselves to rebel against the Church's teachings regarding birth control. With three young children in four years of marriage, and now the threat of a fourth pregnancy, both of them are economically and psychologically despondent and sexually frustrated from trying to follow the Rhythm Method. The author himself is Catholic, and one has to wonder if he still believes as he apparently did then.

Still, this story of Adam and Barbara Appleby, which spans a single day of Adam's attempts to carry on his thesis research in the Reading Room of the British Museum, raises all the questions of authority vs. conscience that concerned Vatican II. Lodge even manages to bring about a classic comedic denouement without it seeming contrived. Good "historical" reading for the Lodge afficionado. The Penguin edition also includes a revealing introduction by the author discussing the story behind the novel and the themes he was attempting to address.

This short novel is a great way to relieve the anxiety of academic work. I recommend that all academics and students read it about once a year to keep sane. Hard to believe the author's claim that it is not autobiographical...

David Lodge is a favorite author of mine, and his other two immensely entertaining and funny novels are Paradise News and Small World.

Lodge is a craftsman, and it is sheer pleasure to read his sentences. His knowledge of and facility with Anglo-Catholicism is unique, especially since he can turn it into laugh-out-loud comedy. His characters are well developed and garner your sympathy, and he leaves you with a rare sense of our humanity and shared irony. Again, he is a craftsman, and his writing is superb. This novel is short and especially funny. Don't miss it!

David Lodge is a favorite author of mine, and his other three immensely entertaining and funny novels are Paradise News, Therapy, and Small World.

Lodge is a craftsman, and it is sheer pleasure to read his sentences. His knowledge of and facility with Anglo-Catholicism is unique, especially since he can turn it into laugh-out-loud comedy. His characters are well developed and garner your sympathy, and he leaves you with a rare sense of our humanity and shared irony. Again, he is a craftsman, and his writing is superb. This novel is short and especially funny. Don't miss it!

This book is a satire about the musty traditions of Catholicism in 1960s England, a time when Vatican II had the potential to open doors to equal rights for women, realistic sexuality, abortion, and other things. Unfortunately, this book is now as stale today as those Catholic strictures were then.

I like David Lodge's books, and I was happy to find this one a library shelf recently. But it just doesn't work. It's neither fish nor fowl. The sophisticated reader can find much more clever satire. The unsophisticated reader won't understand half the things he's satirizing, especially when he's copying famous authors' styles. And the ending is very weak, though pleasantly upbeat.

Despite my lukewarm response, I did enjoy Lodge's evocation of an academic's life spent in the British Museum's reading room and arguing over long, beer-soused lunches. That world has died, and I think it really did exist, and I would have liked to be a part of it.

I also found the scenes in which the author was propositioned by a randy teenager to be surprisingly erotic, given that they were played for laughs.

Should you read it? Sure, if you like British humor and you want a quick beach read. But don't expect to put it on the shelf next to Lodge's better works.

_The British Museum is Falling Down_, published in 1965, is the book in which David Lodge seems to have found his metier -- the comic novel. It also reflects Lodge's Catholicism (as with his later books) -- in this case particularly the frustrations of sincere Roman Catholics with the Church's prohibition on birth control.

The novel is set during one day in the life of Adam Appleby. Adam is working on his Ph. D. thesis in English Literature, and he goes in every day to the British Museum to research his subject. He is also married with three young children. He dreads the prospect of another, but he and his wife are practicing Roman Catholics, and thus are restricted to the "Safe Method" of birth control -- basically an advanced version of the Rhythm Method. But this morning his wife is now three days late for her period.

Adam's day is very funnily detailed, as he basically gets nothing done on his thesis, between problems with his motor scooter, worry about his wife being pregnant, and various misadventures, involving a fire scare, a sherry party, and a visit to the aging niece of a minor Catholic novelist on whom Adam is something of an expert. The book is short, cleverly written, very smartly plotted. Lodge includes sections parodying the work of a number of well-known writers, such as Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway. The characters -- Adam, his wife, his friends Camel and Pond, the novelist's niece and her daughter, a fire-breathing Irish priest, etc. -- are delightfully portrayed. It's not as substantial a book as such later novels as _Changing Places_ or _Paradise News_, but it's great fun.

Adam Appleby feels the terrible Catholic anxiety of another unwished pregnancy. Throughout an entire day of mirabulant, fascinating experiences one discovers how David Lodge portrays the difficulties people had to overcome on those days when just thinking of the pill was a venial sin. I recommend it!

You will enjoy reading Lodge's British Museum even more after you have spent an afternoon in its Reading Room. The novel is witty, funny and highly critical of Catholicism. If you like Joyce's Ulysses, you will love Lodge's British Museum. Lodge's use of parody and pastiche make you feel as if you were in Conrad's, Kafka's or Woolf's shoes. It is the best example of the neo-realist, anti-modernist writing of the 1950's. Enjoy it!

Adam Appleby's day of feared pregnancy will bring a smile to the face of any reader who is old enough, or Catholic enough to remember what life before contraception was like. This little book is full of high fiction wit and academic delight. I recommend it warmly.