Customer Reviews

Out of the Shelter

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

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

As a professor, I used this book when teaching a class on British history. It's one of my favorite books and my students loved it as well. Lodge is an incredibly gifted writer and his ability to evoke the more painful aspects of adolescence (while letting you see the amusing side of it as well) is fantastic. It also provides a wonderful insight into American culture and our consumer-minded society.

Originally published in a slightly different form in 1970, this was one of Lodge's earliest-written books and differs considerably from his later "academic" fiction. It's also the most autobiographical of his works, featuring Timothy Young who, like Lodge, was born into a lower-middle-class family in southeast London in 1935, and who, also like Lodge, spent a month on holiday in Heidelberg in 1951 during the Allied occupation. Timothy, who is brighter than his parents really care for or understand, has a chance at university instead of apprenticeship, but he's hesitant to leave the world he's used to and in which he knows his way around so thoroughly. Going to visit his ten-years-older sister, who works for the American forces, however, is in every way the turning point of his life, his first chance to leave the "shelter" of family and habits. He discovers he can deal with foreign places and foreign people -- both Germans and Yanks -- and can get along on his own. He encounters new ideas through his sister's friends, notions that open his mind to the possibilities of the future. And he begins to figure out his own sexuality along the way. Lodge is very good with narrative. Timothy is a very sympathetic character and the writing style evolves as he does. A first-rate Bildungsroman.

"I am most disappointed with this copy. I had paid $10.48 for a new paperbook and got a recycled book that had been dedicated to the original buyer in handwriting on the inside cover. This is meant for a gift so it is not only unacceptable but also most inconvenient. Time is limited until Christmas and I particularly wanted this book." I have put one star for the suppliers not the book! The book is a lovely little account of the war years from a child's perspective. This item was shipped from New Chapter Recycling.

This is my third David Lodge book, and I think I've just about exhausted my interest in him. I find his humor to be lukewarm, his musings about Catholicism to be uninteresting, and his sexual desires to be strangely out of place with the passivity of the rest of his narration. I think I would find Lodge to be very creepy in-person.

In "Out of the Shelter," Lodge takes a semi-autobiographical look at growing up during and immediately after WWII in England. First, there were wartime terrors, deaths, and shortages. Then there were years of deprivation of goods and services, as England slowly climbed out of an economic hole.

For the narrator, Timothy, a chance to spend a several-week school vacation with his sister in Heidelberg, Germany, where she was working for the American forces, becomes his entry to a much more exciting, colorful world. He literally comes "out of the shelter" that is evoked at the beginning of the book in a bomb shelter, as well as the metaphorically limited life that his parents have accepted accepted for themselves and designed for him (including his years in Catholic schools and their modest ambitions for his career).

In Heidelberg, Timothy tags along with his sister and her hard-drinking, sex-talking American pals. He devours the beauty of the region, and he revels in all of the foods and consumer goods which have been denied to him in England. He hears about sex, and he hears sex. He has sex, sort of. He even becomes witness to a possible spy-and-homosexuality scandal involving his sister's friends. Those few weeks change Timothy's life.

Yes, despite the tumultuous weeks, the book is flat. The descriptions of the partying in Heidelberg are tepid compared to really good authors, like Fitzgerald. The dialogue falls far short of witty. The emotional descriptions are pallid compared to a Joyce or a Henry James. (And if you think I'm not being fair to hold him up to the Joyce-James standard, I'd respond that Lodge brings it on himself by writing in his "Afterward" that he modeled this book after their works.) And then, in the middle of this cliched stuff, Lodge bursts out with sexual remarks all over the place --- a 5-year-old boy and girl lying naked with each other, women joking about their breast sizes, a woman spreading her legs in front of the teenager, eavesdropping on sex in the next room, etc. It just doesn't ring true.

On the positive side, the author does his best work in describing the feeling of despair that youngsters and young adults must have felt in England in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was the prime of their lives, but they were stuck in a gray, wet, cold country that, in the author's words was "a whole system of prudent rules and safeguards, painfully learned in the school of scarcity." It's no wonder that the author (in real life) and his characters yearned to escape it.

In the summer of 1951, Timothy Young leaves London, where he had lived and suffered through the Blitz and where "austerity" keeps England on wartime rationing even worse than in Germany, to vacation with his sister Kate in Heidelberg. She has lived in Germany since early in the war, taking up with a group of men who "want to live in the present, want fun and companionship without emotional involvement." Young also befriends an intellectual conscientious objector, who points out to him just how shallow these people are. Written in 1970 and revised in 1985, this was not written as a comedy (as many of Lodge's other novels are), but it is still very funny in spots. Lodge explores some interesting ideas throughout the book, especially about loyalty and the self. Disappointing is the long epilogue that is tacked on at the end. I still thought this to be one of Lodge's better novels, though.

I believe that Mr. Lodge was able to capture the redevelopment of Germany through the sensitive eyes of a developing man. The novel's topic is quite extraordinary. Knowing that the novel was one of Mr. Lodge's first works is amazing, as he seem seasoned with his humour and irony. Bravo.

Regardless of your conditions, life does not have to be place of limitations. Among the many topics which this novel is about, this one seems to me the most striking one.

Timothy is a young fellow, with a very conservative father. The latter is afraid of modifying its daily routines and by the same token, is having a hard time understanding why his children will want something different of life than what he suggests. Not even the war changes him a bit.

Nevertheless, Timothy is willing to take risks although pushed a little bit by the example and funds of his sister, who left the family house to join the US army as a secretary, and is not willing under any circumstances to return to the dark and humid rooms of her home or the supervision of her parents

When Timothy arrives to Germany a country which was ten times more destructed than England he is shocked not only by the affluence of material goods that he can find in the US Army camps located there. He is also surprised by the spirit of its people. Willing to forget the past, and more than that anxious to lift its country from the bits and pieces that remained. While England although it won the war, remains a place were its politicians are unwilling to recognize that life will never be as before and for the same reason seem incapable to react and find solutions to their lack of material wealth.

While living in Hildelberg, Timothy will find not only that he alone is capable of directing its life but also to understand the basic need of freedom that guided the acts of his sister.

Those are reflected in the abandonment of its catholic affiliation, her economic independence, her flirtations with several guys at the same time and finally the taking of a casual lover.

What surprises Timothy the most is that she is not broken by this open defiance of family and British social rules, but actually that her life is fun, fulfilling and more interesting.

And when he synchronizes in the same frame of mind, life also opens up for him.