Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

First published: 1980, in Great Britain as How Far Can You Go? (U.S. edition, 1982)

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work: 1952-1978

Locale: England

Principal Characters:

• Angela,
• Dennis,
• Michael,
• Miles,
• Polly,
• Edward,
• Adrian,
• Ruth, and
• Violet, students at the University of London and members of the New Testament Study Group at St. Jude’s Church
• Father Austin Brierly, the curate at St. Jude’s and leader of the New Testament Study Group
• The Narrator, an anonymous voice who occasionally enters the narrative

The Novel

Souls and Bodies is a deceptively simple novel about the special rigors of growing up Catholic. It traces the lives of ten major characters over a twenty-six-year period, from 1952, when the novel opens, to 1978, when it closes with the installation of Pope John Paul II (and with the author’s, or authorial narrator’s, writing of the last chapter). The central event during these years, in terms of Church history and therefore in terms of these characters’ lives, is the convening of the Second Vatican Council. Part of the effectiveness of the novel derives from the way in which David Lodge interweaves fiction and history, the individual lives of his characters on the one hand and Church history and doctrine on the other, so that each is given equal importance and neither made subordinate. It is not only the private and the public, however, that Lodge weaves together so skillfully, but also the individual plots devoted to each of the major characters—plots that diverge in some respects and converge in others. Thus, the novel proceeds chronologically from 1952 to 1978, but the progression is anything but smooth as Lodge fragments the novel into the separate character plots that appear in each of the seven chapters; the resulting effect is less of continuity than of splicing as Lodge tries to answer the question his title (in the British edition) poses: How it was, how they lost their virginities, how things began to change, how they lost their fear of Hell, how they broke out, away, down, up, through, and so on, how they dealt with love and death, and finally, how it is.

The Characters

Of the novel’s ten major characters, only one, the priest, Austin Brierly, is known by both his first name and surname. The others are known solely as Angela, Dennis, Michael, Miles, Polly, Edward, Adrian, Ruth, and Violet—their individual identities nearly swamped by the homogeneity of their Catholic background. In creating a novel of nearly faceless characters, Lodge took a considerable risk, but one that is entirely appropriate to the novel’s larger meaning, for just as the characters search first for love and then for sexual satisfaction, which eventually leads them to the moral autonomy they both welcome and fear, so, too, does the reader find himself in a similar situation, trying to make his way through a narrative (as they do through a moral) labyrinth. The reader’s task is made all the more interesting and problematic in that the novel’s author, or rather its anonymous authorial narrator, frequently appears in his own novel, intruding in the narrative in order to comment on or digress from it. Even his attitude toward his characters is unstable. He, as well as the reader, can deride their naivete from his historically, or chronologically, privileged perspective, yet even as he indulges in this condescension, Lodge does not choose to dismiss them, treating them sympathetically and allowing them an individuality that both Church doctrine and the childlike way they are named seem to deny.

Critical Context

Souls and Bodies is that rare novel that successfully combines a realistic style and subject with postmodern assumptions and techniques. Arguably Lodge’s finest and most complex work of fiction, Souls and Bodies was preceded by The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), Out of the Shelter (1970), and Changing Places (1975), the novel in which he first took postmodernism seriously. Like Changing Places, Souls and Bodies is what Lodge has elsewhere called a “problematic novel,” one in which the writer incorporates into his work his own hesitancy as to how to proceed with the business of writing in an age that appears to be not only postmodern but postnovel as well. The contemporary novelist is, Lodge has noted, at a crossroads from which the traditional realistic novel appears to diverge into two separate roads, one the nonfiction novel, the other fabulation. Lodge chooses neither by hesitantly choosing both. In this way, he creates his own version of what John Barth has aptly called the literature of replenishment, a way out of literary exhaustion that acknowledges the facts of postmodern life without indiscriminately succumbing to them.

Bibliography

Bergonzi, Bernard. “A Conspicuous Absentee: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel,” in Encounter. LV (August/September, 1980), pp. 44-56.

Christian Century. XCIX, May 26, 1982, p. 638.

Commonweal. CIX, December 3, 1982, p. 664.

Gauna, Max. A Yearbook in English Language and Literature, 1981.

Haffenden, John, ed. Novelists in Interview, 1985.

Halio, Jay L., ed. British Novelists Since 1960, 1983.

Library Journal. CVI, December 15, 1981, p. 2407.

National Review. XXXIV, July 9, 1982, p. 845.

The New Republic. CLXXXVI, April 7, 1982, p. 37.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, January 31, 1982, p. 3.

The New Yorker. LVII, January 25, 1982, p. 103.

Newsweek. XCVIII, December 28, 1981, p. 70.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self Conscious Fiction, 1984.