On New Year’s Day 2025, British Catholic novelist and literary critic David Lodge died at the age of 89. A professor of English literature at the University of Birmingham until his retirement in 1987, Lodge has a firm place among both campus novelists and Catholic writers. While he did not quite reach the rank of such British Catholic novelists as Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, Lodge still must be considered one of Britain’s finest Catholic writers, whose work will be read for generations to come.
Lodge was best known for his “Campus Trilogy,” a series of satirical novels (“Changing Places, “Small World,” and “Nice Work”) that eviscerated the highly politicized world of elite academia. Using American post-structuralist literary and political theorist Stanley Fish as his model, Lodge created the hilariously self-important Professor Morris Zapp. Zapp is a pompous, arrogant opportunist who considers himself not merely the smartest person in the room, but the brightest light at the university where he teaches, the University of Euphoria (modeled after the University of California, Berkeley). Through Zapp and a supporting cast of academic poseurs, wannabes, has-beens and never-weres, Lodge shined a light on the fragile egos and pretentious posturing of the modern professoriate.
A light touch on serious topics
But Lodge’s gift was to write ironically without sarcasm. While academics could see themselves in the wickedly funny portraits of university faculty in Lodge’s novels, none could claim that he was unfair or mean-spirited. His writing shined a light on the foibles of academic life, but always with a light touch and self-deprecating charm. Lodge wrote ironically about folks whose entire careers are built on irony, which makes the campus novels both acute in their vision and temperate in their application. And, of course, he was laughing at himself, too.
This is also the style that Lodge used in two of his “Catholic” novels, “The British Museum is Falling Down” (1965) and “Souls and Bodies” (1980) (originally titled “How Far Can You Go?”). Both novels apply Lodge’s gift for comedy to a serious consideration of the Church’s teaching on marriage, sexuality and procreation.
“British Museum” accounts for a day in the life of Adam and Barbara Appleby in the early 1960s. They are practicing Catholics, adhering to the Church’s teaching on contraception, but wondering if the ongoing Second Vatican Council might change or relax it. Adam is a 25-year-old graduate student, while Barbara stays home in their tiny London flat with their three young children, Claire, Dominic and Edward. (One character asks if they intend to work through the entire alphabet.) Eyeing Adam disapprovingly as one might an overactive stud bull, their landlady pulls Barbara aside to explain that there are “Things You Could Use” and “Clinics” that would give you the “Things.”
Barbara is “late,” and Adam spends the day anxiously wondering if child F might be on the way, and how he could afford it if so. Along the way, he fantasizes about becoming the first English pope and changing the teaching with a stroke of the papal pen. What is charming about Adam and Barbara is that while they probe the theology, they adhere to the practice. They are committed to the authority of the Church’s teaching, even though they struggle with particular aspects of it. Even we Catholics who do not struggle with the teaching can understand the anxiety that Adam and Barbara experience. And, yes, Lodge allows us to laugh at ourselves. He is always funny but never vicious.
“Souls and Bodies” is something of a thematic sequel to “British Museum,” largely set after the conclusion of Vatican II and the promulgation of Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”). The characters in “Souls and Bodies” are less docile than Adam and Barbara, having been disappointed by the encyclical. They try to rationalize their sexual lives around its teaching, rather than structure them in accord with it. This somewhat tracks Lodge’s own journey of faith, which he admitted had less purchase over his moral life as he aged. But perhaps Lodge might have taken a lesson central to “Souls and Bodies,” which accounts for the sadness and disorientation of the characters who venture furthest from the Faith.
Hope of Heaven
Baptism leaves an indelible mark on the soul. One cannot become “un-Catholic,” regardless of how far one strays from adherence to the Faith. The measure is consistent witness with, rather than repudiation of, the Faith. This is the persistent message of the themes and characters of David Lodge’s Catholic novels. And it is a salutary lesson. Lodge was, and remained, a Catholic novelist throughout his delightfully productive career. While I do not know the state of his personal faith at the end of his life, I do know that the indelible mark of his baptism means he died with the hope of heaven, despite — not because of — any merit of his own. And thank God for that. David Lodge, rest in peace.
