Customer Reviews

Souls and Bodies

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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.

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.

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.)

The book is a marvellous commentary on the 20th Centuary Catholic Church and contraception - highlighting, often comically, the Church's own contradictions and dead end arguments - whilst maintaining the reader's understanding of why and how people avidly follow doctrines that are often detrimental to them, until they hopefully force change and growth. It will amuse and enlighten non, lapsed and practicing Catholics. But BEWARE, "Souls & Bodies" is the SAME book as "How Far Can You Go?".

The book is great, but only the cover and the title make it different from the book 'How far can you go' from David. Still it Christianity living on the edge!