The British Museum Is Falling Down (King Penguin)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointingly weak, early comic novelette
Review: David Lodge can be clever and witty and even hilarious, but in this early comic novelette, about a Catholic graduate student and his wife for whom the "Safe Method" is proving anything but, he's rarely any of these. Lodge describes in the introduction how the book is laced with parodies of various great writers, which are meant to provide to provide half of the book's comedy, along with the plot itself. He confesses that the original British edition was published without calling attention to the pastiche parts and most reviewers missed them, so it's not entirely clear who's at fault here.

After an unfortunate turn of events in his novel "Souls and Bodies," the narrator says something to the effect of, "See, I told you this wasn't a comic novel." Neither is this one. If you haven't yet read his "Trading Places" or "Nice Work" or "Souls and Bodies", try one of them first.

Rating:
Summary: You MUST Read This!
Review: David Lodge is a favorite author of mine, and his other three immensely entertaining and funny novels are Paradise News, Therapy, and Small World.

Lodge is a craftsman, and it is sheer pleasure to read his sentences. His knowledge of and facility with Anglo-Catholicism is unique, especially since he can turn it into laugh-out-loud comedy. His characters are well developed and garner your sympathy, and he leaves you with a rare sense of our humanity and shared irony. Again, he is a craftsman, and his writing is superb. This novel is short and especially funny. Don't miss it!

Rating:
Summary: You MUST Read This!
Review: David Lodge is a favorite author of mine, and his other two immensely entertaining and funny novels are Paradise News and Small World.

Lodge is a craftsman, and it is sheer pleasure to read his sentences. His knowledge of and facility with Anglo-Catholicism is unique, especially since he can turn it into laugh-out-loud comedy. His characters are well developed and garner your sympathy, and he leaves you with a rare sense of our humanity and shared irony. Again, he is a craftsman, and his writing is superb. This novel is short and especially funny. Don't miss it!

Rating:
Summary: Thank God for the Pill
Review: In the back cover, the publisher promoted this book as incredibly funny. Being familiar with some humor writers such as Tom Sharpe, I thought that that he fell on the same category. Sadly that is not the case. However, the book provides a pleasant read.

Maybe at the time that this novel was written, when the contraceptive pill had just been released in the market, and some catholic couples were struggling between common sense and the stupidity of the Vatican in terms of family planning, the book was cleverly mocking those captured in such particular doubts. But now when such dilemma is largely ignored by any couple with its feet on the ground, the absurdity in which the plot is founded loses strength.

The same happens regarding to the other topic which is the mockery of academic research. Nowadays very few people will spent one or two years buried in a library looking for informationWe have the Internet. However most of the funny events occur while Adam Appleby is at the library of the British Museum.

In other words if you are looking for a book to laugh until your ribs hurt better spend your time with "A Confederacy of Dunces" or also with a book written by Tom Sharpe.

Rating:
Summary: Yes its funny but not too much
Review: In the back cover, the publisher promoted this book as incredibly funny. Being familiar with some humor writers such as Tom Sharpe, I thought that that he fell on the same category. Sadly that is not the case. However, the book provides a pleasant read.

Maybe at the time that this novel was written, when the contraceptive pill had just been released in the market, and some catholic couples were struggling between common sense and the stupidity of the Vatican in terms of family planning, the book was cleverly mocking those captured in such particular doubts. But now when such dilemma is largely ignored by any couple with its feet on the ground, the absurdity in which the plot is founded loses strength.

The same happens regarding to the other topic which is the mockery of academic research. Nowadays very few people will spent one or two years buried in a library looking for informationWe have the Internet. However most of the funny events occur while Adam Appleby is at the library of the British Museum.

In other words if you are looking for a book to laugh until your ribs hurt better spend your time with "A Confederacy of Dunces" or also with a book written by Tom Sharpe.

Rating:
Summary: More contrived than usual, Catholics and contraception I
Review: Relatively early Lodge (1965 - his third book), and more driven by form than insight. While he's still working with a persona he's familiar with - a young Catholic academic - the book is less honest and quasi-autobiographical than usual (although he clearly understands the procrastinating nature of the student too well). Rather it's a deliberate, often quite broad, comic piece and while he's better at it than many others I don't think humour is his strongest asset. Perhaps the book was something of a way of working on his skills, and as such a lot of the situations felt contrived (of course all the situations in novels are contrived, but the best ones don't usually feel that way). Indeed, as he notes in his interesting afterword (it's nice when later editions include some 'DVD' type extras), there are no less than ten passages of deliberate and at times extended parody of the styles of famous novelists such as Conrad, James and Hemmingway, and half the trick is making the story work while playing with these forms. Alas, with only the gnostic secrets of a dimly remembered B.A. in Lit. at Macquarie Uni at hand, these in-jokes went right by me; a more literate reader could enjoy the book a lot more I dare say.
 
Thematically much is made of the issue of birth control and Catholicism, an issue he explored more effectively in How Far Can You Go? Lodge tragic-comically presents the picture of couples torturing themselves with the absurd (and ineffective) complexities of things like the 'safe' and 'rhythm' methods, when assumed by Lodge (as implied in the text and stated in the afterword) the only possible alleviation of this awful state is contraception: the Catholic church is simply cruel and wrong to deny this.

Admittedly he does give a good alternative line to a Catholic priest: "Practise some self control: I do," but even this paints the picture of the devout catholic couple having to undergo great sacrifice and suffering ... as if there are no other means (perhaps even preferable ones for the woman) of achieving sexual pleasure than intercourse. The naivety surprises me, but I suppose sex was so little talked about in the fifties that a lot of 'nice' people did assume that sex meant merely the 'act' (part of me feels sure, however, that a lot of people in pre-pill times would have been better at finding ways of 'safe-sex' than today's condom-culture knows). Conversational mores have changed - previously the bible was something social pressure pushed you to make time for, discuss and pursue, but sex was embarrassing to talk about, something of a faux pas, and characterised by much ignorance: now the roles are reversed. Whatever, I can't feel the degree of sympathy Lodge wants to evoke given the knowledge that it's not an either/or of celibacy or conception, of contraception or rare and fearfully anxious sex.

Moreover he doesn't begin to address the uncomfortable notion that just maybe the catholic church does have a case: that it would be no bad thing if society felt that if you weren't prepared to potentially raise a(nother) child you shouldn't be having intercourse; that sex should be treated with a lot more reverence and respect. The denial of consequence in sex is immediately convenient, but hardly morally courageous, or even intellectually admissible. I'm not saying a case can't be made for contraception, I'm just saying that Lodge doesn't seem to acknowledge that some intelligent and sincere people have made a reasonable case against it. Clearly in the last generation there's been a massive increase in casual sex due to the easy acceptance of contraception: whether or not this is a GOOD thing, either morally or even in terms of the ultimate felicity of the individuals involved, is hardly a closed question.

Rating:
Summary: Good "historical" reading for Lodge fans
Review: This is Lodge's third novel and first comedy, written while he was a young lecturer on a fellowship in the U.S.; while it's much more narrow and not nearly as subtle as his later work, it's still pretty good. There's a good deal of slapstick but more pastiche and sly satire, and Lodge's ear for hilarious dialogue is very evident. The subject matter, however, is now rather outdated, as it concerns the trials and tribulations of a young English Catholic couple who can't quite bring themselves to rebel against the Church's teachings regarding birth control. With three young children in four years of marriage, and now the threat of a fourth pregnancy, both of them are economically and psychologically despondent and sexually frustrated from trying to follow the Rhythm Method. The author himself is Catholic, and one has to wonder if he still believes as he apparently did then.

Still, this story of Adam and Barbara Appleby, which spans a single day of Adam's attempts to carry on his thesis research in the Reading Room of the British Museum, raises all the questions of authority vs. conscience that concerned Vatican II. Lodge even manages to bring about a classic comedic denouement without it seeming contrived. Good "historical" reading for the Lodge afficionado. The Penguin edition also includes a revealing introduction by the author discussing the story behind the novel and the themes he was attempting to address.

Rating:
Summary: Fun comedy of an Anglo-Catholic academic and birth control
Review: _The British Museum is Falling Down_, published in 1965, is the book in which David Lodge seems to have found his metier -- the comic novel. It also reflects Lodge's Catholicism (as with his later books) -- in this case particularly the frustrations of sincere Roman Catholics with the Church's prohibition on birth control.

The novel is set during one day in the life of Adam Appleby. Adam is working on his Ph. D. thesis in English Literature, and he goes in every day to the British Museum to research his subject. He is also married with three young children. He dreads the prospect of another, but he and his wife are practicing Roman Catholics, and thus are restricted to the "Safe Method" of birth control -- basically an advanced version of the Rhythm Method. But this morning his wife is now three days late for her period.

Adam's day is very funnily detailed, as he basically gets nothing done on his thesis, between problems with his motor scooter, worry about his wife being pregnant, and various misadventures, involving a fire scare, a sherry party, and a visit to the aging niece of a minor Catholic novelist on whom Adam is something of an expert. The book is short, cleverly written, very smartly plotted. Lodge includes sections parodying the work of a number of well-known writers, such as Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway. The characters -- Adam, his wife, his friends Camel and Pond, the novelist's niece and her daughter, a fire-breathing Irish priest, etc. -- are delightfully portrayed. It's not as substantial a book as such later novels as _Changing Places_ or _Paradise News_, but it's great fun.