Souls and Bodies [Hardcover]

David Lodge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1981

The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else...

In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order.

A satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Souls and Bodies take an unblinking look at the sexual revolution and the contemporaneous upheavals in the Catholic Church. The result is as unsettlingly true as it is funny.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 243 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; First Edition edition (December 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688009336
• ISBN-13: 978-0688009335
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,432,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative and at times funny., September 15, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Souls and Bodies (King Penguin) (Paperback)

Regular reader's of Lodge fiction may find this a little unusual. There are many of his usual comic devices and delightful surprises. Yet, there is an anger that I haven't seen in his other writings. Anger at God and religious institutions--most notably the Roman Catholic Church. In one chapter a pile of sludge above a mining village soaks with rain and finally cascades over a school full of children. If it had come a half hour later the school would have been empty. The bodies are dug out over the next few days. In the same chapter a baby is born with Downs syndrome. Lodge ends the chapter by pointing out to the reader that he never said this was going to be a comedy. The novel traces the lives of a group of Roman Catholic University students in England, together with their priest. It follows them through middle age. Detailing doubts about their church and her authority in areas of sex (including homosexuality) and family relations. The major problem running through most of their lives being contraception and the fear of unwanted pregnancy. I very much enjoyed the book. Those who dislike black comedy and anti-fiction may disagree. While not raised a catholic, my own rigid protestant upbringing led to questioning that is similar to what I found here. Some fundamental questions come up in this story--presented in clear, very readable text.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now THAT'S Catholic humor!, October 21, 2002

By 

Pauline J. Alama "Fantasy author" (Rutherford, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Souls and Bodies (King Penguin) (Paperback)

David Lodge's story of a group of British Roman Catholics passing through Vatican II is by turns funny, touching, and sad. But it's the humor that lingers -- not the surface-level "don't nuns look funny?" stuff that usually passes for Catholic jokes, but smart, pointed humor that comes from an intimate knowledge of the joy, pain, absurdity, and glory of wrestling with a two-thousand-year-old religion and struggling to reconcile it with everyday life in a changing world. Example: a bright medical student kneeling at Communion, trying not to be preoccupied with the theological implications of the Body of Christ passing through the whole digestive process. But none of the shots are cheap: the attitude toward faith is respectful without knee-jerk acceptance or rejection of orthodox pieties. A brilliant, sensitive, funny, tragic, hopeful, doubting, unforgettable book.

4.0 out of 5 stars One Ounce of Humor, One of Desperation..., August 14, 2004

By 

Lucretius Borges (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Souls and Bodies (King Penguin) (Paperback)

Lodge's impeccable English style and wry humor will always entertain the reader and evince deep reflections. Still, are not his characters, at times, utterly predictable? Polly, Miles, Miriam, Michael and all others end up in 1980 more or less as faint variations of what they were in the 1950s, when their stories start being told. Were the major changes in the world and in the Catholic church really just a sad joke played on them? There is a rather sad and depressing side in all of Lodge's novels from the sixties and the seventies that few people seem to notice. (On the contrary, his most recent "Therapy" is quite an exception.)