First Hilda, then Damien, then Mark. Hilda’s life was ruined – she was a complete neurotic. Damien was all queer and twisted because he had thought she liked him when she didn’t. And Mark – he would never make a priest. He would end up as another frustrated religious failure like herself and Damien. Religion had ruined him. Religion had ruined them all.
(The Picturegoers, page 208)

David Lodge’s first novel, published when he was 25. Short and powerful, it confidently establishes techniques and themes which will dominate his later writing.

Multiple characters

The most obvious feature is the technique of featuring a dozen or so characters and continually cross-cutting between them. The novel is divided into three parts but within them there are no chapters, no sense of moving between big blocked-out scenes. Instead there are a hundred or more relatively short (sometimes less than a page) sections of prose, each devoted to one or a pair of characters, their dialogue, thoughts, decisions, actions, feelings.

This is a very economical, snappy approach. Compare and contrast the directly opposite approach of his friend Malcolm Bradbury who, in his debut novel Eating People Is Wrong for example, opens one chapter with a page-long description of the ‘moral’ development of one of the characters (Emma Fielding), as if rewriting a Jane Austen novel. Unlike Bradbury, Lodge is actually in the 20th century and realises that cutting between short cameo scenes means you don’t have to give yourself the labour of writing – and the reader the burden of reading – long establishing sequences. Bang! You’re there!

The title, The Picturegoers, is not as mysterious and cryptic as I initially took it to be: the book literally describes a cast of picturegoers ie a group of (generally young) people who, on the evening described in part one, all converge on their local, run-down cinema in the fictional town of Brickley, and for whom the cinema flickers in and out of the warp and weave of their lives over the next few months.

Dramatis personae

• Mr Maurice Berkley, one-time manager of the music hall which declined, was shut down, and replaced by the new cinema, which he sadly manages, lamenting the passing of the glory days.
• Mr Mallory, kind-hearted middle-aged man, head of a vast Catholic family, eyes the cinema-going young girls in their tight dresses, but warmly loves his wife.
• Patrick and Patricia Mallory, two of their younger children, who bicker and argue their way to the cinema; when Patricia leaves early a middle-aged man moves next to Patrick in the dark and puts his hand on Patrick’s thigh – there is a short description of the panic of a pubescent boy at being touched up before Patrick is brave enough to get up and flee the building.
• Clare Mallory – only recently arrived home after abandoning her vocation as a nun, still full of piety and innocent emotions, good and honest and pure and who immediately bewitches the new lodger, Mark.
• Mark Underwood, recently arrived with the Mallorys as their lodger, is a lapsed Catholic who unexpectedly finds himself responding to the Irish Catholic atmosphere of the Mallory household, initially because he fancies the beautifully innocent Clare. He is a would-be writer, depressed at having his stories rejected for publication, and so presumably the representative of the ‘author’ in the text i.e. a more educated, ironical observer of the life around him, and with more space than for other characters devoted to his early life, his upbringing in a stifling lower-middle-class household in the respectable suburb of Batcham.
• Damien O’Brien, cousin of the Mallorys over from Ireland, rat-faced, intensely pious, seething with jealousy over the casual way Mark Underwood asked Clare out, takes her to the pictures and has generally become her boyfriend – exactly what Damien obsessively wants to be.
• Father Martin Kipling, naive and innocent, is on his first visit to a ‘cinema’, in order to see the pious Song of Bernadette. He trips over feet in the dark, wants to chat to neighbours and then is appalled at the scantily clad ‘actresses’ on the screen whose sole purpose seems to be stirring up lascivious passions in their audience. He woefully discovers the Song isn’t on this evening, instead he is watching the legendary Hollywood actress Amber Lush in a variety of scenes which show off her taut buttocks and pert bosom.
• Len, working class man, in love with Bridget, is frustrated by both his poverty and the knowledge he is about to be called up for National Service.
• Bridget, Len’s girlfriend.
• Doreen the usherette who dreams of having the kind of life those stars up on the screen enjoy and sort of fancies the older, married, Mr Berkley.
• Harry, a wound-up, monosyllabic, very angry youth, dressed in black, who fantasises about hurting everyone he meets, carries a flick knife and – very spookily – follows Bridget home down dark roads and across bombed-out lots so that I was beginning to worry I might be about to read a rape scene, but no, she gets home just in time, making herself a cocoa with her hands shaking. Makes me realise that in all the other Lodge novels, in the Amis novels and Bradbury novels which I’ve been reading, there are few if any actual criminals – men obsessed with sex in every one, sure, as the authors themselves seem obsessed with sex; but men who break the law, through theft or vandalism or violence i.e. a type of man who obviously exists in the real world in large numbers — none.

Part one

All the characters converge on the knackered old Palladium cinema, bringing their hopes and fears into its sweaty, smoky interior, as per the thumbnail sketches above.

Part two

Six months later. We learn that the serio-comic result of Father Kipling’s visit to the cinema was a fervent sermon he gave denouncing film as the work of the devil and announcing he would be moving the Thursday Benediction to Saturday nights, as an alternative, and launching a crusade against the Cinema. Six months later, a mere 12 parishioners are turning up for it and he ruefully regrets the enmity created with the cinema manager, who complained to Kiplings bishop about the boycott, the bishop then, embarrassingly, over-ruling Father Kipling and saying there was nothing ungodly about the cinema.

Meanwhile, the Mallory’s lodger, Mark, who started out pretending to be religious in order to seduce Clare, really has undergone a conversion back to his boyhood Catholicism and, ironically, now finds himself the pious one in the relationship, while Clare herself has completely redirected her libido towards him – with tearful results.

Damien is the furtive watcher, the ‘creeping Jesus’, who is always spotting them in the street or kissing in a doorway or overhears their endearments on the front doorstep, as his crush on Clare curdles into hatred and contempt.

The old cinema manager Mr Berkley is now having an affair with the once naive and innocent usherette Doreen, happy now to strip off in the manager’s office and climb into their makeshift bed for office sex, before they get dressed again, he drives her home and then returns to his wife.

Harry, the would-be rapist, takes his stalking of Bridget to another level, lying in wait for her in a bombed-out lot near her house but – to our relief – miserably fails to assault her; he’s barely got his hands over her mouth before she bites his fingers down to the bone and screams her head off, sending him running off down the street.

Central to this part is the evening when a number of the key characters converge on The Palladium to see The Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 Italian Neorealistic classic which Mr Berkley is showing as part of an effort to liven up the cinema and draw in a new crowd. In this it is a complete failure, a depressing and inconclusive movie which reminds most of the visitors of their own cramped lives, except for Mark, of course, who incisively and intellectually analyses it for Clare, who understands nothing, but nods approval in her doomed infatuation.

Part three

Two months after that evening things have moved on for all of the characters. This third part again features an evening at the cinema; after the failure of trying contemporary European movies Mr Berkley has booked the latest Rock’n’Roll movie, blaring with its Bill Haley soundtrack. This time there are queues around the block of Teddy Boys and their pony-tailed, bobby-soxed girlfriends. And in this final 40-page section Lodge winds up the stories of our ten or so characters:

Clare and Mark have a painful showdown in which he declares his wish to join the Dominican Order and try his vocation. Clare is furious at him leading her on, leading her to abandon the last of her religious feelings which she transferred to secular love, only to be dumped.

Mark walks back to the Mallory house where he is mortified to discover Mrs Mallory has stumbled over some of his scribblings about love and Clare and sex, explicit notes and thoughts jotted down for a story. She thinks he’s revealed himself as immoral when, ironically, he is reaching the height of his religious faith and completely disavows the writings. He offers to leave immediately and makes his way, disconsolately but firmly back to the stifling purgatory of his suburban home, determined to apply to a religious order.

Devastated after their final argument, Clare wanders the streets in a daze, passing the cinema and its huge queue of jitterbugging rockers but, with no money to spend, ends up, ironically, in the local Catholic church. Here – as it happens – she is press-ganged into being a witness to the rushed wedding of Len and Bridget.

After the sad service she finds herself in the church alone with Father Kipling and realises for the first time how feeble and unsatisfactory he is, and how sadly conscious he is of his shortcomings as a priest. Depressed, she emerges to find Len and Bridget having cheap photos taken and then is further press-ganged into accompanying them to the nearest Lyons Corner House for their wedding ‘reception’.

As she listens to their tale of poverty – nowhere to stay, Len’s poor widowed mother, his miserable time doing National Service in the Army – Clare is overcome with compassion and writes them a cheque for £5 to pay for a few days’ honeymoon at Margate or somewhere, and promises to talk to Father Kipling about a little church flat which she knows has become empty because the old lady who was living in it has gone into hospital.

These scenes could hardly convey a more depressingly miserable, black-and-white, cramped, austere, limited, narrow ration books and National Service existence. How awful the 1950s sound.

If the two main characters, Mark and Clare, end in disarray, minor characters have unexpected epiphanies. Harry, the would-be rapist, hanging round outside the cinema, finds himself drawn in and then the Teds and Rockers who are packing the place start getting out of their chairs and dancing to Bill Haley in the aisles. To his amazement a pretty little blonde girl asks him to dance and he turns out to be able to do it and it makes him smile and even laugh, for the first time in years; later that night he walks her home and, after a quick peck on the cheek, makes an date to see her at the Monday night hop.

We eavesdrop the thoughts of Mr Berkley, the cinema manager – initially happy at the big box office takings then concerned at the way the Teds are getting out of their seats – as he dismisses rock’n’roll for being unmusical, simple-minded etc. He predicts it will only last a year then be replaced by the next fad. But we have seen, in the story of Harry, that simply dancing, that music and dance and physical expression, can liberate the soul.

At the end of Part Two Lodge showed us Mr Berkley having sex with Doreen in his office, for the first time not using a condom as he had run out. Now, two months later, Doreen is pregnant. Mr Berkley knows his (Catholic) wife will never divorce him in that guaranteed-to-make-everyone-as-miserable-as-can-be way of theirs, so he gives Doreen a load of money and the address of a boarding house in Newcastle where she can go to have it. In almost the last scene we see her confidently on the Newcastle train getting into conversation with a likely cockney lad also going the same way. Might love be about to blossom…

It is a multi-stranded ending to a multi-stranded novel and a triumph, unexpected, moving, insightful, poignant.

Themes

David Lodge’s three themes are Catholicism, sex, and English literature academics and all are present here.

Catholicism

In the point of view and thoughts of the priest and every member of the Mallory family (Dad, Mum, Patrick, Patricia, Clare) as well as the reconverted Mark and the Irish cousin Damien – that’s seven characters who all provide different perspectives on faith and belief and sin and the rest of it, so we have the thoughts of the cradle Catholic, the convert, the zealot, the lapsed Catholic, the teenage Catholic, the ex-nun, and so on. Enough Catholicism for most tastes.

The common mistake of outsiders, that Catholicism was a beautiful, solemn, dignified, aesthetic religion. But when you got inside you found it was ugly, crude, bourgeois. Typical Catholicism wasn’t to be found in St Peter’s, or Chartres, but in some mean, low-roofed parish church, where hideous plaster saints simpered along the wall, and the bowed congregation, pressed perspiration tight into the pews, rested their fat arses on the seats, rattled their beads, fumbled for the smallest change, and scolded their children. Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason those people could never be quite like other people, and that was Catholicism. (p.173)

Pilgrimage

A long section at the end of Part Two describes how Mark, in the grip of his new Catholic fervour, undertakes the pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk; it is referred to by other characters and Mark gets out and rereads his diary of the experience which suddenly gives us a blast of full-on first person narrative. This is the first mention of the pilgrimage theme which will also be present in Lodge’s later novels, in comic form in Small World, and more seriously in the concluding sections of Therapy.

Sex

Mark starts out simply wanting to seduce Clare. Damien is obsessed with Clare but sublimates his feelings into fierce religiosity. Clare was expelled from the convent where she had been a novice nun, for her passionate/lesbian involvement with a teenage girl pupil, and now finds herself actively wanting Mark’s masculine touch. Old Mr Mallory enjoys watching the pretty young things dolled up on a Saturday night, but also enjoys making love to his plump wife. He is disappointed when Mr Berkley experiments by showing contemporary foreign films, namely the depressing The Bicycle Thieves.

Where were the luscious slave-girls with swelling breast and buttocks like ripe fruit, on which he could feed his harmless, middle-aged lechery. (p.130)

Mr Berkley enters Doreen in his office. Len, on their wedding night, blissfully ‘broaches’ Bridget, Damien sees couples in the sunny park, men’s hands up girls’ dresses, driving him wild with anger/frustration.

I am, I hope, an averagely-sexed middle-aged man and no prude, but I find the relentlessness of the Male Gaze in all Lodge’s novels a little hard to take.

[Mr Berkley] stood at the back of the packed auditorium. There were people standing all along the back, and down the sides. He watched with interest a young girl in front of him in tight trousers. Her buttocks were twitching rhythmically to the music. On each alternate beat a hollow appeared in her left flank. (p.226)

In a touching scene the confused 17-year-old Patricia, who has a crush on Mark, has a chat with him about how isolated she feels in the family and how she wants to run away from home. All very sensitive apart from one false note. She’s wearing a faded old dressing gown buttoned up to the neck, but: ‘Beneath the faded material was a figure full of promise.’ (p.169) Who makes this remark? Not Mark, who is in his newly moral religious phase. Not Patricia herself. It is the narrator, the creator, the author, creating all sorts of women whose shapes and naked bodies he can then lovingly describe.

[Patrick, 16] had slipped into a rather alarming habit lately of looking at every girl or woman he encountered to see how big her bust was. Bust. That was a new word he had just discovered. There were several words that meant the same thing. Bust, bosom, breasts…  (p.136)

All the way back in 1960 I wonder if Lodge’s novels were praised for their frankness and honesty and lack of shame about sex. I can see the merit in his not shying away from the fact that sex does indeed dominate lots of men’s thoughts lots of the time. But it is a bit like the food in a certain restaurant always being a bit too salty or spicy or oily. Lodge is great at what he does, but the relentlessness of the sex sex sex, and the way it’s always the horny male view of sex, sometimes gets a bit too much.

Literature

Mark is a would-be writer, still very young, self-conscious and unpublished, he keeps a notebook which he fills up with bons mots and insights, is constantly on the lookout for material, feelings and incidents which he can turn into a short story, and he is considerably more intellectual than the other characters. He shares his sophisticated insights into The Bicycle Thieves, into the warmth and piety of the Mallory household; he gets the lengthy theological passages tossing to and fro about the religious life and sin and redemption and forgiveness etc, in this respect the precursor of all the other Lodge protagonists who will agonise over Roman Catholic faith, sometimes at very great length. Most 20th religious novels document the painful fading of a character’s religious faith – I thought it original enough to see a young man following the opposite trajectory.

Humanity

Lodge’s style is cold and blank, not deliberately heartless but always factual, clear, unambiguous, unsentimental. For example, he describes Clare’s feelings when Mark dumps her, but doesn’t really wring the reader’s heart. Same for Mark’s increasing sense of devotion, specially in a Mass he attends. But if there aren’t extremes of emotion, not emotion in the language, anywhere in his work, there is often a kind of cool, limpid humanity; an implicit sympathy for the sadness of so many people who life has let down. Thus Clare, after being dumped by Mark, finds herself observing Father Kipling as if for the first time, as if for the first time really understanding something about other people and their pain. Without any comment from the author it dawns on me that she is possibly finding within herself the compassion and charity for others which she was too young to experience when she was a novice nun.

[Father Kipling] stooped over the sink, leaning heavily on locked arms, and staring at his hands, flattened against the bottom of the bowl. The sense of failure which haloed his bowed head made Clare conscious for the first time of his identity as a person. He had never been an impressive priest –  dispensing sacraments, sermons and whist-drive announcements with the same patient ennui, like a weary shopkeeper who has forgotten why he ever started to sell. But now, at this moment, she understood his inadequacy in personal terms, realised what it meant to him not to be able to move people, not to be able to find the encouraging word, the inspiring slogan. (p.217)

With its understated humanity, with its confident handling of the multi-character cast, in its quiet way I think this is a very good, a very powerful and moving novel – and quite amazing considering it was his first.

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