Paradise News

by David Lodge

Overview

Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home.

Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the unfamiliar company of package tourists: honeymooners; young women looking for Mr. Nice; families nuclear and fissile. But it is the island itself that holds the most astonishing surprises, as an accidental encounter opens up to Bernard possibilities of life, and love, never dreamed of in his normally overcast habitat. Paradise News is an enchanting—and very funny—portrait of the late flowering of an honest man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140165210
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/01/1993
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.71(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Editorial Reviews

"A wonderfully entertaining -- and ultimately touching -- introduction to a masterly writers' work." -- The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Lodge combines his past fictional interests in Catholicism (The British Museum is Falling Down, etc.) and social satire (Nice Work, etc.) to produce this always engaging and clever tale of innocents abroad. The unlikely naif is Bernard Walsh, a rather dour, middle- aged, part-time instructor in theology from a minor college in Lodge's fictional town of Rummidge. What we don't know at first is that he's also a former priest, the son of Irish-born immigrants to South London who have never become reconciled with their son's descent into apostasy—his now "wasted life." When the family's first black sheep summons Bernard to her deathbed in Hawaii, he agrees to attempt a reunion between her and her brother—Bernard's cantankerous father—whom she hasn't spoken to in 40 years. Getting old Jack Walsh to travel halfway around the world is just the start of Bernard's problems. Once they arrive in "paradise," events conspire to postpone the meeting in which brother and sister will confront some long-suppressed family secrets. Bernard's personal journey—his loss of virginity, and his leap forward in self- confidence—is all the more enjoyable because Lodge sets it against a larger profile of the fellow Brits who come to Hawaii on Bernard's charter. There's Russ Harvey, a yuppie honeymooner, and his Ice Maiden wife, whose vacation is spoiled from the start by a revelation at the wedding reception; there are a couple of elderly second honeymooners who record everything on video; there are the two spinster teachers in search of "Someone Nice." And, of course, no Lodge novel would be complete without a pompous academic—in this case, an anthropology prof who specializes intourism, which he is "deconstructing" on a grant from the British Association of Travel Agents. American litigiousness and health policy come in for some well-deserved mockery along the merry way. Narrative tricks aside, Lodge's Catholicism and his gimlet eye make him the true heir of Evelyn Waugh.

Kirkus Reviews