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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply felt and deftly told autobiographical novel,
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This review is from: Out of the Shelter (King Penguin) (Paperback)
British writer and critic Lodge's smart and tender novel begins in London during WW2. The narrator, Timothy, is a much-loved child in a middle class home. The voice is intimate and childishly sincere and perfectly suited to Lodge's intentions: sympathetic understanding of a very likable kid. Characters are affectionately but not cloyingly drawn, and bad things happen, too. Eventually Timothy goes to postwar US-occupied Germany to visit his much older sister (in Lodge's actual past, it was an aunt). It's a heady experience. Some of the best Lodgeisms are in this novel: the untrustworthiness of happiness, which he fears is simply "a ripening target for fate;" the meaning of travel; leavetaking and loss; loyalty to home and the known vs. the desire for adventure and newness; the powerful lure of the material world; love and eroticism and their yearned-for occasional convergence.Funny, too. This novel is a gem and a great yarn besides.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The fifties seen from the sixties,
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This review is from: Out of the Shelter (King Penguin) (Paperback)
A teenager from an overly respectable family in the cramped restricted England of 1951 gets a glimpse of the good life lived by affluent Americans in Germany. Having lived in Britain and visited Germany in the fifties and come to America in the sixties I could identify with much of it. Lodge tries to use the US/UK contrast to make a point about the uses of adversity and the trauma of poverty. The problem with this is that, as a paradigm of restrictiveness and backwardness the England of 1951 wasn't that bad. I meet people now in the US from Bangladesh, Egypt, Haiti and points East and South for whom the culture shock of American wealth and freedom is infinitely greater. Fiction may not be the right vehicle for the point he wants to make. I understood more from the introduction (in which he suggests that the poverty of 1950's Britain was due to government policies)and the epilog. In the introduction he mentions an epilog by Don Kowalski that was excised from the original edition and has not been reinstated in this one. It would be interesting to read that.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Like boyhood tales from your favorite uncle,
This review is from: Out of the Shelter (King Penguin) (Paperback)
"Out of the Shelter" is a gentle story written with a spirit of generosity. I think Lodge has some affection for all his characters, even his villains. Reading this book feels like hearing your favourite uncle telling stories of his boyhood.For all this, it certainly isn't Lodge's best book. (It originally came out in 1970, his third book.) Bits feel clumsy, lacking in confidence - sometimes there's a bit too much explanation of characters' motivation and transitions between scenes can be jarring. The narration is peculiar in places, as if it was originally written in the first person and then quickly rewritten with an omniscient narrator. I'd still recommend the book. Further recommendations: If you're looking to read your first book by Lodge, try `Changing Places'. If you already love Lodge, this is a great way to continue the affair. You might also like books by Alison Lurie and Wallace Stegner.
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