The classic Lodge novel features an academic, often a bit fusty and behind-the-times (who at various points will give us potted and very readable summaries of his or her intellectual work) – taken out of their comfort zone (generally spirited abroad) – where their horizons are widened and their beliefs put to the test, where their lives are somehow transformed. In this, they are like the characters in E.M. Foster’s Italian novels.

Paradise News is a variation on these familiar themes: Modern, agnostic Roman Catholic theologian Bernard Walsh comes from a large Irish Catholic family and teaches at a theological college but no longer really believes in God. One day out of the blue he receives a phone call from his aunt Ursula who is dying of cancer in distant Honolulu (she married an American during the war) asking him to fly out to see her and bring his father – her brother – John Walsh, with him.

The novel is divided into three parts but is, in practice, a story of two halves: the first two-thirds of the 360-page novel is rather downbeat and depressing; the last 80 pages or so transform it into something rich and deep and moving.

Paradise promised

Parts one and three are told in the third person by a detached narrator. He takes us into the mind of Bernard, a typical Lodge character, highly educated and articulate, with a very low ability to make decisions or live. Bernard was the gifted son of Irish working class parents who showed especial religious sense from the first and was given the best of everything. Bernard passed easily from seminary school into the priesthood and from there into theological teaching. But when he was eventually given the opportunity of being a parish priest he slowly realised his faith had evaporated. For a while he thought he was in love with one of his parishioners who made a pass at him, and this made his exit from the Church unnecessarily messy, attracting bad publicity from the press and breaking his parents’ hearts.

When we meet him he is working as a part-time lecturer in theology, earning a pittance and living with the heavy sense of failure: failure in religious belief, failure in career terms, a failure to create a loving relationship with a woman, most of all a terrific failure to his family, themes rammed home with repeated small turns of phrase sprinkled throughout the text:

‘The baggage of guilt and failure he had brought with him to Hawaii (97)… His sense of his own inadequacy (102)… he was left with a residue of guilt to add to the heap he had already accumulated (142)… Failed again (157)… Feeling pretty dismal and depressed myself (160)… Why do I so often have the feeling of being a ghost these days? (165)… ‘

Bernard journeys from Rummidge (the fictional version of Birmingham which has featured in Lodge’s previous four novels, the city where Lodge spent his entire academic career) to the run-down suburb in south-east London where his ageing Dad lives (Lodge was born and raised in south-east London) to collect his reluctant Dad and both catch a flight to Hawaii.

This introduction takes up the first 100 or so pages and allows Lodge:

• to paint in the background to Bernard’s rather woebegone life, his loss of nerve when he was offered a woman’s love, his sense he has let his orthodox family down by ending up a mere part-time lecturer, detail of the decline of his faith via various modernising theologians
• to comment in that oh-so-English, so middle-aged way, about the ghastliness of modern life – the horrible canned music, the sentimental movies, the crowds, the noise, the pollution
• and to begin to depict ten or so other, essentially comic, characters at the check-ins and departure lounges of the various airports and on the flights and at the hotels, who we are to meet again and again through the narrative

A gallery of minor characters

The inclusion of a cross-section of his fellow travellers to Hawaii is a repeat of the technique perfected in How Far Can You Go? and Small World, of cross-cutting at speed between short, half-page vignettes featuring the generally comical mishaps of secondary characters. It adds texture to these minor figures, depth and variety to the fictional world of the novel, and directly or indirectly fleshes out the book’s themes:

• the Best family, constantly squabbling among themselves, headed by irritable Mr Best who is routinely threatening to write to the authorities about whatever latest rip-off or holiday disappointment they are subject to
• Russ Harvey, a bumptious trader at an investment bank, who’s come on honeymoon with his new wife, Cecily; unfortunately, Cecily discovered at the wedding that Russ had slept with a colleague from work and is thus in an epic sulk from the moment we meet her till the very end of the book
• Sidney and Lilian Brooks who’ve flown all this way to meet their son Terry, whose career as a photographer is thriving in Hawaii
• Terry Brooks and his boyfriend, Tony – it comes as a devastating blow to his father to discover half-way through the novel that Terry is gay
• Brian and Beryl Everthorpe (we met Brian in Lodge’s previous novel, Nice Work, where he is the scheming number two to the protagonist, Vic Cox, and leaves Vic’s company, Pringle and Son, to set up a sunbed rental firm)
• Sue Butterworth and Dee Ripley, two girls on tour who are out for a good time

Towards the end of the middle section of the novel Lodge deploys an entertaining passage made up entirely of postcards and letters from each of these characters, snapshots of their different styles and mentalities, humorously revealing their everyday concerns. It is very well done, like the excellent letters section of Changing Places, showing how effective and completely domesticated what were once considered avant-garde experiments can be in the hands of a contemporary and essentially comic novelist.

Chief among these secondary characters is another academic and – in a familiar pattern – a far more go-ahead and successful one than the main character (compare Changing Places where the gung-ho American critic Morris Zapp contrasts with the pallid, ineffectual Brit, Philip Swallow). The alpha prof in this novel is Rupert Sheldrake, an anthropologist studying ‘the holiday’ as a social and historical phenomenon. In a rather glib analogy he compares the modern package holiday to aspects of medieval religion: the pilgrimage to distant lands, collecting souvenirs/relics, the compulsory visits to notable sights/shrines. It is no accident, Sheldrake points out, that the package tour took off just as organised religion went into decline.

I had a sense of déjà vu about this character and his insights about the modern holiday. A decade earlier, in How Far Can You Go?, the character Ruth had similar thoughts upon visiting Disneyland:

It struck Ruth that Disneyland was indeed a place of pilgrimage. The customers had an air about them of believers who had finally made it to Mecca, to the Holy Places. They had come to celebrate their own myths of origin and salvation – the plantation, the frontier, the technological utopia – and pay homage to their heroes, gods and fairies: Buffalo Bill, Davey Crockett, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. (How Far Can You Go? 1981 Penguin paperback edition, page 178)

And the entire premise of Small World is that the world of academic conferences is like the world of medieval romance, full of knights (academics) on pilgrimages to foreign places. A sense of a theme being recycled…

Nonetheless, when he pops up the reader raises a cheer: Sheldrake knows how to work the system, his research topics are carefully calculated to secure funding from the tourism industry, he flies everywhere first class for free, is put up at the best hotels and – when we see vignettes of him interspersed among the other characters – is always sipping champagne, eating at the finest restaurants or furiously jotting down notes. He is, at least to begin with, the Morris Zapp of this novel, the winner, the man who – in contrast to the grumpy, failed, self-accusing Bernard – always flourishes; whose intellectual discourse is flashy and superficial and therefore perfectly suited to these vulgar, gaudy, greedy times. He is, to begin with, the principle of energy in what is otherwise a rather downbeat story.

Paradise lost

The novel offers, in a typically Lodgean programmatic kind of way, a number of deconstructions of the notion of ‘paradise’:

• The academic Sheldrake, whenever we meet him, is actively gathering material for an academic paper showing how the notion of ‘paradise’ doesn’t exist; it is a garish fiction created and marketed to the gullible masses.
• Yolanda Miller, a long-time resident of Waikiki, tells Bernard that ‘paradise’, when you actually live there, is boring. Not least because its original history and culture have been obliterated by American consumerism.

‘Paradise lost?’
‘Paradise stolen. Paradise raped. Paradise infected. Paradise owned, developed, packaged, Paradise sold.’ (p.177)

• Bernard sees for himself the grim underside of ‘paradise’ when he takes a tour of care homes trying to choose one to move his dying aunt into – shabby, urine-smelling places populated by senile, demented, drooling, incontinent old-timers.
• And lastly and most devastatingly, Bernard spends the middle part of the book writing a long diary or journal trying to explain to himself how his own career as an outstanding seminarian, pupil and then teacher at a leading Catholic college, fizzled out – trying to fathom how and when he lost his faith, how he stopped believing in the gospel, the good news, the paradise news (p.190).

From all directions, then, the paradise news is – there is no paradise.

Grumpy old man

Lodge was 56 when this novel was published, and his protagonist is meant to be only 44, but both character and author seem taken aback by lots of aspects of modern life: Bernard has never heard of or seen a stretch limo before; he’s never heard the word ‘paramedic’; he’s never heard of a champagne cocktail or sushi; he is surprised that a hotel clerk fills out a form instead of filling it in; when a waitress outs down the food and says, ‘There you go!’ he asks where? Admittedly, Bernard has lived the sheltered life of a seminarian, but nonetheless, it gives Lodge the author ample opportunity to register the relentless disappointments of modern life.

The roads are always packed; whether in London or Honolulu you get caught in traffic jams; flights are delayed; taxi drivers charge a fortune; American medicine is prohibitively expensive; Hawaii is buried under high-rise hotels; all the tourist attractions are cheap and tacky; the whole place is pervaded by pounding rock music.

Everything is too big in this country: the steaks, the salads, the ices. You weary of them before you can finish them. (p.162) There was always that sense of unspecified lack or longing in the warm humid air of Waikiki. (p.264)

In conclusion – For the first two-thirds, this is quite a depressing book. Lodge’s world-view, the rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs, feel as tired and dispirited as his depressed protagonist. Gone is the exuberance and comic invention of Changing Places or Small World. Now it is a big world and it is all too much.

But in the last third of the novel the story takes a dramatic turn, a descent into more serious terrain which leads, unexpectedly, to a kind of secular resurrection.

Sexual healing

Bernard falls in love (Lodge’s heroes always do). Hopelessly head-over-heels in love with an experienced American divorcée, Yolande Miller. And she is a therapist, a counsellor.

It turns out that the middle section of the novel, the journal or diary Bernard has been keeping – which includes details of his several dinners with Yolande and his feelings for her interspersed with raw autobiography detailing his progression through seminary school, his loss of faith and his abortive relationship with a fat, infatuated parishioner – it turns out that this text is destined to become a forlorn love letter to Yolande.

Late one night, a bit tipsy, before he can change his mind, Bernard drives round and posts it through her letterbox. Next day she meets him and, instead of flinging it in his face and laughing, says she understands. And promises to heal him. Heal him sexually and psychologically. It is an amazing break for Bernard, for the story, and for the reader, a break or rupture in the seamless discourse of depression and disappointment which had dogged the story.

And so over a course of days in his darkened hotel room, Yolande takes him carefully, tenderly, lovingly, through the process of becoming comfortable with kissing, then stroking, then caressing, then petting, then arousing and then making love to a woman. All things this repressed celibate priest had never imagined possible. (pp.266-78) This sequence is genuinely moving, tender and compassionate.

Paradise regained

But what of dying aunt Ursula? Well, once he’s arrived in Hawaii, a lot of the novel is concerned with Bernard slowly getting to know and respect his aunt. He helps her leave the dingy care home she was trapped in, takes over her finances and arranges for her to stay somewhere much nicer. And in the course of their long conversations, once she is sure she can trust him, she tells him she was abused as a girl, aged 7. It made her incapable of sex, incapable of being close to a man, destroyed her marriage and ruined her life.

Her brother – Bernard’s father – didn’t do it, but knew about it. That was why he was so reluctant to come to Hawaii, suspecting some kind of confrontation was inevitable. And why, after he is knocked over by a car in a minor accident soon after their arrival, his Dad is keen to stay in his hospital room and put off any meeting with his sister.

In a converging plot line, Bernard’s difficult sister, Tessa, who disapproved of the whole trip, suspicious that Bernard is only going to wangle Ursula’s inheritance – goes bananas on the phone when she discovers their father has been in an accident.

Tessa has had lots of children in the Catholic manner, one of whom, Patrick, is severely disabled and she has martyred herself to look after him. She is an angry woman. Bernard is just beginning to blossom from the sexual healing described above when he is horrified to receive a telegram announcing that Tess is on the next flight out. He panics that she will ruin everything, his intimate afternoons with Yolande and the planned reconciliation between John and Ursula Walsh, before it even happens.

But it all works out. Turns out Tess hasn’t come to ruin everything, but because she has discovered her husband, Frank, is having an affair with a pretty receptionist at work. She has just walked out and said, you look after the kids, you look after Patrick, you see what it’s like.

During some tricky conversations between grown-up brother and sister some home truths are uttered. She tells Bernard he was always their parents’ golden boy; the girls had to snatch their knickers down off the clothes horse whenever he was about in order not to give him impure thoughts; he got the best clothes and new shoes when the other siblings had to make do with hand-me-downs; he even got the best cuts of meat off the Sunday roast.

Bernard never knew any of this and is stricken to realise how much his parents, and his other siblings, stinted themselves so he could progress his career. Only to watch him abandon it all…. The devastation… Brother and sister talk long into the night and come to a better understanding of each other…

Then they jointly stage-manage the meeting of Ursula and John Walsh, trundling their wheelchairs together on a terrace overlooking the sea, then tactfully leaving them to discuss the long-ago abuse which has haunted both of them. It works. Ursula has her say, and John apologises, and Ursula forgives him. Later, as Bernard drives her back to her hospital, Ursula says she could die happy now, could fly right off a cliff as the native Hawaiians said the soul does, her mortal body crashing on the rocks, her spirit rising up to heaven.

The low mechanicals’ party

The penultimate scene is the end-of-package tour party, held in a hotel complex of truly stupendous ostentation and vulgarity, where the plotlines of the lesser characters are all neatly tied up. The whole thing feels very like a Shakespeare comedy in its division into ‘serious’ main characters, and walk-on minor, comic roles. And in the way the entire narrative is comic in structure – all conflicts are reconciled and harmonised – giving a very satisfying sense of completion, even if, page by page, the book is not that funny, far less high-spirited than its predecessors.

Thus Terry’s dad is reconciled to his gay son when Terry and Tony rescue Russ after the latter got knocked unconscious by his own surf board and nearly drowned. Not only that, but the accident had the hitherto-alienated Cecily running up the beach screaming to give her unconscious husband the kiss of life, and they, too, are reconciled. Brian Everthorpe entertains everyone with his awful home movies of the holiday and (almost) everyone drinks and is merry.

Epilogue

In the final scene, Bernard is back at his theological college, where he has now been given a full-time job, and it opens with a couple of pages of his (very thought-provoking) lecture on the modern theology of paradise (many Lodge novels contain papers and lectures of unashamed intellectual content).

He has patiently been taking a weekly call from Yolande in Hawaii as she tries to decide what to do with her life, whether to go ahead with divorcing her unfaithful husband, whether to stay in Hawaii or come to England, and whether she loves Bernard or not.

Finally, he receives a long letter from her and goes to sit in the college garden as the sun comes out and the birds sing. (The setting is very similar to the vision of university life as utopia which is the setting for the happy ending to the previous novel, Nice Work.) Yolande has made her decision. She does love him. She has booked a ticket to fly to Rummidge to be with him this Christmas. Bernard folds up the letter and walks into the Senior Common Room with a broad smile on his face. ‘Good news?’ asks a colleague, indicating the letter in his hand. Yes, replies Bernard. Very good news. Paradise news.

Conclusion

So the novel feels as if it has taken on board all the negative aspects of modern life and the human condition -–from traffic jams to environmental degradation, from failed relationships to sexual abuse, from disappointed hopes to aborted ambitions – gathered together and dramatised all the most powerful arguments against the possibility of paradise – and overcome them.

It is still possible to live well. It is still possible to love. It is still possible to overcome ancient pain. It is still possible to be redeemed, here and now, to be among the chosen, to enter paradise in this world.

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