Book Reviews - Review 286

Part-time theology lecturer Bernard Walsh learns that his aunt in Hawaii is dying, and at her request drags his elderly father to the other side of the world for a final reunion. Once in Hawaii, things are thrown out of kilter by his father's admission to hospital after a traffic accident. Bernard, an unworldly, discontented self-doubter, is forced for the first time in his life to take charge of both complex practical matters and delicate emotional ones.

Bernard is a former Catholic priest, who lost his faith in his twenties and has struggled since then to move on in life. His ambivalence about Hawaii, the self-styled earthly paradise where physical beauty competes with ugly commercialism, throws his attitudes to religion into relief. To his surprise, as he takes stock of his disappointing life, new, positive possibilities open up as a direct consequence of his father's accident. Bernard's refusal to sue the driver of the car that hit him is an act of characteristic decency that pays dividends he doesn't foresee.

The book is in three parts. The first and last parts are narrated in the third person. The first part is largely humorous in tone, with detailed observation of Walsh's fellow air passengers as they chat, bicker and make minor - or in some cases, major - messes of things.

The middle part reproduces Bernard's Hawaiian diary, and introduces an abrupt change of tone from the comic to the poignant. Lodge succeeds in creating a truly individual voice for Walsh: earnest but self-aware, considered and old-fashioned in both his attitudes and his expression. In addition to describing each day's events, Walsh recounts the story of his loss of faith and of his one attempt at a romantic relationship back in England, a sad and awkward affair that petered out unhappily. The backdrop to such rumination is, however, the joyous and unexpected experience of belated romantic awakening.

Things are rounded off in the final part of the novel, which includes various reconciliations, involving both major and minor characters, some of which the cynical reader might dismiss as improbable and over-optimistic. Personally, I think Lodge gets the balance right, his faith in the power of higher human motives ringing true, even if the expression of this faith is cleverly artificial. In fact, their understated cleverness is one of the great pleasures of Lodge's novels. It's only in retrospect that one appreciates the intricacy of the narrative of Paradise News, how much work must have gone into fitting the strands into a satisfying and coherent whole, and how skillfully Lodge weaves theme into action. So if the dialogue is sometimes a little bland, impressing with its readability rather than with a sense of the "music" of real speech; and if the coincidences are sometimes implausible; nevertheless one accepts the status of the book as a work of partial realism, partial comic artifice.

David Lodge never writes bad novels, but this is one of his very best, combining, as so few works of literature do, seriousness with qualified optimism. It's probably the most moving of his books that I've read. Not many novelists could so skillfully combine social comedy with deep contemplation of the possibility of spiritual redemption.

I thought the book could be turned into a rather good film, but these days I doubt that the finance for such thoughtful comedies is easy to come by.