Paradise News

by David Lodge

Book 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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670842281
• ISBN13: 9780670842285
• Release Date: April 1992
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 293 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Writing about what you don't know!

I used to live in Honolulu, after that Nashville. It was and is so annoying to read those books that seem to have been written so an author--or would-be author could take a trip to either and then take the expenses off of ones taxes. A few people have succeeded. Only a few. But some of the losers really stand out--the book that put the snootiest part of Nashville where my neighbor's son-in-law was raising fighting cocks, for instance Fortunately I've forgotten the title and author of that one. Some of the Hawaii ones are almost worse, because there really is a cultural mix there that, I'm sorry, you aren't going to get in a two week visit. So when I first picked up David Lodge's Paradise News I was expecting to cringe through it. No no no no no. Lodge is able to work it so that his main character is clueless enough that it doesn't matter if the geography is screwed up. After all, if you are from England and Ireland, we drive on the wrong side of the road, so that if you start to cross, giving the normal look to the side you normally do, you may be hit by a car. Which indeed happens to our hero's father. Add to this that Lodge is not at all afraid to talk philosophy and religion, and I was hooked.

Perhaps his best

This may be David Lodge's best novel, though I love Nice Work, Therapy, Deaf Sentence and Small World. It is pure Lodge--a comic masterpiece with a serious core. Bernard Walsh is a former priest who comes to Oahu to visit his dying aunt. His dyspeptic father accompanies him and promptly walks into oncoming traffic. The driver who puts his father in the hospital then falls in love with Bernard. Along for the trip are a group of quintessentially British holiday makers, including the tanning bed salesman from Nice Work, Brian Everthorpe. The undercurrents of the novel are theological, with extended ruminations on faith and the possibilities of a heavenly paradise, in addition to the plasticized variety represented by Waikiki. The hallmark of a great Lodge novel is its balance--a balance between humor and pathos, two-dimensional and three-dimensional characters, academic theorizing and recalcitrant reality, jokes, whimsy and the truly profound. Paradise News is a perfect example of Lodge's skills and his deepest novelistic intentions. The book will make you laugh and it will make you cry. It is thus, in the deepest sense of the word, therapeutic, as great novels should be. Do not miss it.

Fantastic; Lodge at his best and that's saying a lot!

David Lodge is one of the most gifted writers around and Paradise News is one of his best books. Bernard is an ex-priest who who left the priesthood after realizing that he was and always had been an atheist. His decision to leave the priesthood (which he entered as an adolescent) leaves him with no real meaning in his life until his aunt calls him to her deathbed. With his father, Bernard travels half-way around the world (from England to Hawaii) in an attempt to reconcile his father and his aunt. In doing so, he discovers who he is and what he has been searching for. The themes in this book (pedophilia/sex abuse, unresolved sexuality among young priests etc.) are especially timely right now but even without these themes the book has an incredible pull and power.

A gentle, witty novel about change

Most of Lodge's books deal with academia, generally centering around a rather seedy little University in the mythical working-class village of Rummidge. While the story begins near the school, where the story's principle protagonist is employed part time, the plot quickly moves to the opposite end of the world, both geographically and culturally: Hawaii.Charles Armstrong has arrived with his aged father to visit his long estranged aunt, who married and American and shortly after the war. She's dying of cancer, and wants to see her brother one last time, in part to unburden herself of something terrible that happened between them when they were children. Charles knows nothing of this when he begins his trip, and assumes he'll be there for a week or two to help his aunt settle up.But things are never that simple in a Lodge book. Charles and his father have booked their passage via a discount tour group full of the sorts of broadly drawn caricatures that Lodge does so well. There's an Australian couple coming to meet their son's "special friend" that they assume is his finace', a professor specializing in the anthropology of travel (who is mistaken for a travel writer and given the full VIP treatment), and a family that must be every travel agent's nightmare, to mention a few.As always, Lodge manages to weave all these stories together and bring them all to a satisfying conclusion that is both surprising and pleasant for all- or at least most- concerned.

Lodge's best so far!

Such a great book! It's a good satire of charter tourism, and at the same time it's about faith, paradise and a big life changing step for the main character. This book contains a lot, and it's really worth reading!