Customer Reviews

Paradise News

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4 star:		(5)
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In Paradise News, David Lodge does something unusual. His main character is a forty-something virgin, sexually inhibited and celibate by force of habit. Perhaps more uncommon, Bernard is an honest man. He's even a somewhat boring, ordinary man, not particularly neurotic or troubled, and yet still cabable of growth over the course of the novel. More extraordinary still, Lodge gives us a sensible love story and sensible sex. How often do we see that? It makes a refreshing change. But for those who don't think an honest man with moral concerns getting a sensible--if much overdue--introduction to sex and falling in love in a sensible way doesn't sound interesting, think again. Lodge is always worth reading. He entertains (funny situations; the wish fulfillment story of how Bernard's aunt ends the book better off than she started it) and he provokes thought (among other things, vacationing as the modern-day pilgrimage, a pursuit of paradise).

The only strikes against this book are that it starts off a bit slow, focusing at first on characters you know will be minor. It picks up speed quickly enough, but the minor characters are perhaps not all they could be--a small concern really, when they are better than many writers would have managed. And the incest theme lacks punch. It may be a sad commentary on the cynicism and jaded sensibilities of my generation when one of us can say, "Ho hum, incest again", but that's the way it is. The incest serves its purpose in the novel, but that whole subplot just wasn't as interesting as the larger story of Bernard's renewal. And as that IS intersting, Paradise News is well worth reading.

_Paradise News_ concerns Bernard Walsh, a defrocked Anglo-Catholic priest who is teaching theology half-time at a depressing college in a depressing English town. His aunt contacts him from Hawaii with the news that she is dying, and that she would like him to convince his father (her brother) to visit her, at her expense, for one last time. They have not met since the '50s, for insufficiently explained reasons, though the scandal over Aunt Ursula first marrying, then divorcing, an American serviceman might have something to do with it.

Bernard's father is a disagreeable old man who is afraid of flying, but somehow, with the unexpected help of Bernard's scheming sister Tess, who is afraid of losing Ursula's fabled inheritance, he is convinced to go. Bernard lucks into a last-minute cancellation of a tourist package, getting the two of them a cheap flight, and more to the point of the book, allowing Lodge to portray a wide variety of English tourists, to a variety of comic effect. Some of the thematic center of the book is provided by an academic, an anthropologist of tourism, who has various cockeyed theories about the ritualistic place of tourism in human life, and who is much taken with the repeated motif of "Paradise" in the names of Hawaiian tourist traps. The other thematic center, of course, revolves around Bernard's own loss of faith, and the stories of his rigid Catholic upbringing, his seminary training, his years teaching, and his brief time as a parish priest.

In Hawaii, Bernard's father is almost immediately run down by a car. So Bernard's time is taken up with dealing with his father's hospitalization, and then with Aunt Ursula's situation, partly in a shabby nursing house, partly in hospital. Bernard must deal with finding a place for Ursula to live out her short expected term, and this in the light of her rather more straitened than expected circumstances. Bernard also meets and falls in love with the woman who ran over his father, a woman in the process of divorcing her husband, who hates Hawaii, but who proves just the right woman for an ex-priest whose only sexual experience has consisted of humiliating failure. We also get glimpses of the other English tourists, these functioning mostly as pretty effective comic relief.

I enjoyed this novel very much. It's both very funny, and quite serious at core. It's well-written, the characters are very well delineated, and their stories are involving and moving. The serious aspects -- the exploration of faith, and paradise, and, yes, tourism, are interesting and intelligent. The only quibbles I'd have would be the convenient resolution of some difficulties: some financial difficulties, and also the easy coincidence of Bernard's "meet cute" with an appropriate woman. But, to be sure, those are conventions of comedy, to some extent.

David Lodge is one of the most gifted writers around and Paradise News is one of his best books.
Bernard is an ex-priest who who left the priesthood after realizing that he was and always had been an atheist. His decision to leave the priesthood (which he entered as an adolescent) leaves him with no real meaning in his life until his aunt calls him to her deathbed. With his father, Bernard travels half-way around the world (from England to Hawaii) in an attempt to reconcile his father and his aunt. In doing so, he discovers who he is and what he has been searching for.
The themes in this book (pedophilia/sex abuse, unresolved sexuality among young priests etc.) are especially timely right now but even without these themes the book has an incredible pull and power.

Such a great book! It's a good satire of charter tourism, and at the same time it's about faith, paradise and a big life changing step for the main character. This book contains a lot, and it's really worth reading!

This may be David Lodge's best novel, though I love Nice Work, Therapy, Deaf Sentence and Small World. It is pure Lodge--a comic masterpiece with a serious core. Bernard Walsh is a former priest who comes to Oahu to visit his dying aunt. His dyspeptic father accompanies him and promptly walks into oncoming traffic. The driver who puts his father in the hospital then falls in love with Bernard. Along for the trip are a group of quintessentially British holiday makers, including the tanning bed salesman from Nice Work, Brian Everthorpe. The undercurrents of the novel are theological, with extended ruminations on faith and the possibilities of a heavenly paradise, in addition to the plasticized variety represented by Waikiki. The hallmark of a great Lodge novel is its balance--a balance between humor and pathos, two-dimensional and three-dimensional characters, academic theorizing and recalcitrant reality, jokes, whimsy and the truly profound. Paradise News is a perfect example of Lodge's skills and his deepest novelistic intentions. The book will make you laugh and it will make you cry. It is thus, in the deepest sense of the word, therapeutic, as great novels should be. Do not miss it.

This is a deceptively simple book to read with many important themes. It is the tale of people from England who travel to Hawaii on a charter package for holiday. The main characters are a lapsed Irish priest,(Bernard) who teaches theology, and his crusty aged father who are summoned to Hawaii to visit a long lost sister of the father who is on her deathbed.

The story is a brisk, breezy satire on Hawaii tourism. With the exception of the main theme and characters, much of the story is not well developed. The main theme, as it involves Bernard stresses growth and change after a lapse of belief in religious dogma. It explores the growth of human love and sexuality as Bernard is able to consummate his relationship with a separated woman he meets in Hawaii, comes to terms with his vocation as a theologian and learns the virtues of love, patience and forgiveness. He comes to appreciate the nature of religious doubt and the attendant spiritual search through human love and through reflections on the human condition as reflected in the works of William Butler Yeats, the Victorian poets, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno, and the Gospel of Matthew, among other sources.

There is a book by John Updike called "In the Beauty of the Lillies" which deals with the lapse of faith by an American Protestant Clergyman. In Updike's book, when faith is lost, all is downhill for the protagonist and his family. I think Lodge's book can be instructively compared with Updike insofar as it raises questions of religion, secularism and sexuality. There is more hope in Lodge's book than I find in Updike's for meaningful human life outside the reach of the creeds.

An astonishing work that covers so much territory so well. Just when you think that there is no salvation for the main character (after all, how can the non-believer believe?) Lodge even manages to find a bit of Paradise in Matthew 25 on a blustery Midlands day. A work of tremendous humor, some pathos, and infinite beauty.

I used to live in Honolulu, after that Nashville. It was and is so annoying to read those books that seem to have been written so an author--or would-be author could take a trip to either and then take the expenses off of ones taxes. A few people have succeeded. Only a few. But some of the losers really stand out--the book that put the snootiest part of Nashville where my neighbor's son-in-law was raising fighting cocks, for instance Fortunately I've forgotten the title and author of that one. Some of the Hawaii ones are almost worse, because there really is a cultural mix there that, I'm sorry, you aren't going to get in a two week visit.

So when I first picked up David Lodge's Paradise News I was expecting to cringe through it.

No no no no no.

Lodge is able to work it so that his main character is clueless enough that it doesn't matter if the geography is screwed up. After all, if you are from England and Ireland, we drive on the wrong side of the road, so that if you start to cross, giving the normal look to the side you normally do, you may be hit by a car. Which indeed happens to our hero's father. Add to this that Lodge is not at all afraid to talk philosophy and religion, and I was hooked.

A wonderful work that explores the mysteries of love between men and women and the love between a father's and son's in back drop we'd all love be in....Hawaii.

It is so difficult to write a sustained comic novel. Yet David Lodge continues to master the form, this being one of many such as NICE WORK. There are metaphors about "paradise" and a quite sweetly sentimental romance amidst a hilarious satire on vacations and tourist destinations (in this case, Honolulu). But with it all, there is an embracing tolerant affection for his characters, and a genuine unpretentious intelligence at work here.