Therapy

set pieces, dark humour, sharp wit and plain farce — here is everything one expects from this author but thricefold ’ — Sunday Telegraph
     
    Nice Work
    ‘The campus novel meets the industrial novel... Lodge charts an improbable but highly entertaining relationship between Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle’s engineering firm) and Dr Robyn Penrose (temporary Lecturer in English and fully paid-up devotee of semiotic materialism)... The result is compulsive reading’ — Daily Telegraph
    ‘A work of immense intelligence, informative, disturbing and diverting... The book confirms David Lodge as one of the best novelists of his generation’ — Observer
    Changing Places , Small World and Nice Work are also published in the omnibus A David Lodge Trilogy.
     
    How Far Can You Go?
    On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society. And with the advent of COC (Catholics for an Open Church), the social lubrication of the pill and the disappearance of hell, it was difficult for Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the others not to rupture their spiritual virginity on the way to the seventies. How far did they go?
    ‘Huge, bitterly funny and superbly presented montage of the false nostrums that assailed Christianity like worms’ — Sunday Times
     
    The British Museum is Falling Down
    The Rhythm Method is the curse of Adam Appleby’s life and the cause of his children’s. As his thesis awaits its birth in the British Museum, his wife studies the thermometer at home. But it seems that ‘Vatican Roulette’ has failed them again and a fourth little faithful is on the way. The serpent tempts Adam towards the chemists...
    With a cast of conscience-pricked Catholics, tertiary-boom academics, passionately celibate priests and a literary lady with her libidinous daughter, David Lodge brilliantly captures the absurd, pitiful dilemma of Catholics in a time when the pill was just an enticing rumour.
     
    Ginger, You’re Barmy
    Jonathan Browne and Mike ‘Ginger’ Brady are conscripts in the British Army in the days of National Service, a grimy deposit of post-war cynicism. It consists of one endless, shambling round of kit layout, square-bashing, shepherd’s pie ‘made from real shepherds’, P.T. and drill relieved by the occasional lecture on firearms or V.D. The reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to this two-year confiscation of their freedom... and the consequences are dramatic.
     
    Out of the Shelter
    The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and subsequent postwar shortages have done little to enrich Timothy’s early youth. But everything changes when his glamorous older sister Kath invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg. Kath, who has long since left home to work for the American army, introduces her sixteen-year-old brother to a lifestyle that is deliriously fast, furious and extravagant.
    ‘David Lodge has brilliantly dramatized a kind of Anglo-American encounter... to have made so well-ordered and humanly engaging a work of fiction in the process is a striking achievement’ — The Times Literary Supplement
     
    Paradise News
    Bernard Walsh, agnostic theologian, has a sort of professional interest in Paradise. But, having come to Hawaii to escort his reluctant father Jack to the deathbed of Jack’s estranged sister, he does not, like his fellow package-tourists, hope for a heavenly holiday.
    ‘Amusing, accessible, intelligent... the story rolls, the sparks fly’ — Financial Times
     
    The Picturegoers
    ‘To the pictures!To the warm embrace of Mother Cinema. Where peanut shells are spread before your feet, and the ice-cream cometh!’
    Mark, the cynical intellectual; Clare, his girlfriend, who loses faith and discovers passion; Harry, the sexually frustrated Teddy boy — just some among the crowd who make their Saturday-night pilgrimage to the peeling suburban Mecca of the Palladium, Brickley, and who touch and shape each other’s destinies.
     
    and
     
    Write On: Occasional Essays 1965-1985
    The Art of Fiction