Paradise News
Wheeler, Edward T.
FLYING HIGH PARADISE NEWS David Lodge Viking, $21, 294 pp. unpretentious, honest, and likable as he grows into competence in facing a world which has lost its old meanings. Bernard is a laicized...
...The souls are departing to the fortunate isle and one traveler, a sociologist with a specialty in tourism, offers Bernard and us the allegory of package tour as pilgrimage...
...Thus, while the total number of voters classifying themselves as independents itation on the last things, but the prayer which evolves from the clear apprehension of death is more an affirmation of eros than of agape...
...No, nor can the institution of the church offer much more than social service...
...This in bald paraphrase is Unamuno's contribution...
...And looking down at their faces from the altar, as I pronounced these promises and hopes week after week, looking at their patient, trusting, slightly bored faces, and wondering whether they really believed what I was saying or merely hoped that it was true, I realized that I didn't, not any longer, not a word of it...
...It is a grand and enjoyable read...
...This is an artfully and vividly realized world...
...Schadenfreude was a term that Lodge used in his earlier works, that joy in others' misfortune...
...The Good News is news of eternal life, Paradise news...
...remains essentially the same...
...The return to her roots is a discovery of a sort of maggot, the sexual serpent in the Catholic stem which cankers marriage and the embrace of life...
...But there is a skull ready to grin beneath the skin of all those who inhabit paradise...
...but the plot leaves little doubt that the forms of theological thought cannot contain the wine of life...
...While it is aimed chiefly at an academic audience, its findings have implications for journalists and politicians as well as scholars...
...The book rehearses familiar Lodge narrative structures: contrasting settings, one in drab English Rummidge and the other in exotic Hawaii...
...But the spirit...
...Not Commonweal 22 May 1992: 23 much pneuma comes through the noose...
...The plot takes Bernard and his crusty father to Hawaii, the paradise of the title, to tend a terminally sick aunt...
...Bernard is a laicized priest...
...The novel ends justly with family reconciliation, happy death, redemption of the body, and atrophy of belief...
...The "silver bullet" which these researchers have found-and remind us about with glee in each chapter-is that the current conventional wisdom that there has been a political "de-alignment" and an enormous rise in the "independence" of voters from party ties is based on "lumping together" three different types of voters who call themselves independents...
...Later we overhear Bernard as he deliv ers an introductory lecture on trends in twentieth-century theology...
...As the flesh withers from his aunty's frame, laicized Bernard discovers mortal rebirth in sexual therapy...
...use the data compiled by the University of Michigan National Election Studies since 1952 and separate those "independents" who say they "lean" toward a political party from those who are "pure" independents...
...This is an honest med Dotty Lynch Ir he Myth of the Independent Voter has only three things going for it: timing, accuracy, and a silver bullet...
...The flesh is indeed always and finally willing...
...Lodge shows us the effects of cancer and the modem way of dying in nursing homes...
...Bernard's spiritual and theological being hangs by the slenderest of hopes-the stretched sense that this life can't be all there is...
...the measure of the author's own trajectory into late middle age can be taken at the narrowness of the arc of the humor he lobs at death: satire becomes more a grimace when the ground starts to open closer to our own feet...
...We also hear the true and narrow bickerings of families over estranged relations, over possible inheritance, of the burden of pro foundly disabled children...
...In this season of "rage is the rage," this book is a particularly helpful path to understanding the lasting attachments of the American voter to the two-party system-and a warning to be wary of claims of the imminent collapse of the current institutions...
...memento mori for Bernard's aged aunt is a call to exhume an episode of sexual abuse in her vivid but distant Anglo-Irish past...
...She and Bernard's father have to come to terms, and do...
...Keith, Magleby, et al...
...Yolande Miller is the initiator of Bernard's awakening to the flesh...
...But David Lodge has us reaching for anthologies to check citations or to pursue a scriptural reference...
...multiple perspectives recorded through the texts of postcards, journals, videotapes and the like...
...It is well researched and well reasoned...
...Sexual tension with a unique Catholic twist, which Lodge exploited so humorously in The British Museum Is Falling Down and Souls and Bodies, still drives the novel, but the force of sex is darker as the chief characters move closer to ends...
...And the effortless prose-the pleasures of the text that are not above a type of readerly foreplay and delayed consummation...
...The answer: "It's as if Jesus left this essentially humanist message [Matthew 25] knowing that one day all the supernatural mythology in which it was wrapped would have to be discarded...
...The cross-matching of the allegory does tease a reader: if tourism is pilgrimage, then the reverse holds true and the church is travel agent...
...For my parishioners, I was a kind of travel agent, issuing tickets, insurance, brochures, guaranteeing them ultimate happiness...
...The journey there gives the book a locus, a sort of Canterbury Tales' Tabard Inn with wings...
...24: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...his disillusionment, his agnosticism, his skeptical teaching of theology, and his awakening to love in "paradise" offer a review of the last thirty years of church history and one of its possible outcomes...
...Here is experienced Eve giving virgin Adam the right news in paradise...
...Two of the three categories are not very independent, at all...
...He asks rhetorically what distinguishes a Christianity purged of a promise of eternal life from secular humanism...
...the shifts from the major plot structure by way of interleaved segments-a cinematic technique-and cameo appearances of characters from earlier novels...
...Thus Bernard on his loss of faith: The appeal of the gospel message...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
