Prolific observer of Catholic foibles: David Lodge, 1935–2025

David Lodge, who died on 1 January at the age of 89, was a writer and academic who used to describe himself, echoing Graham Greene, as an “agnostic Catholic”. His fiction was infused with themes of the faith of his youth – set against a backdrop of the theological controversies that marked the 1960s as the Church attempted to bolster her teachings in the face of the sexual revolution that had swept across western societies on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following the Second World War.

Lodge broadly aligned himself with the progressives; he was disappointed when Paul VI promulgated Humanæ Vitæ in 1968, and channelled his frustration into writing. In The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), the first of what might reasonably be regarded as his “Catholic novels”, a young academic called Adam Appleby (a name straight out of Genesis) rejects the bright lights and sensual temptations of the 1960s. He and his wife hold fast to the Church, while he worries about the impending arrival of his unplanned fourth child.

British Museum aged quickly, as it became obvious to anyone with eyes to see that, in the greater part of the Anglosphere, Humanæ Vitæ was being kept more in the breach than in the observance. He took up the latter theme in How Far Can You Go? (1980), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and appeared in the United States as Souls and Bodies; it teases out the tensions between the desire of many Catholics to keep the faith of their youth in the face of the temptation (and convenience) of artificial contraception.

Paradise News closed the trilogy in 1991. With more shades of Greene, it features an ex-priest who has lost his faith; the beauty of a tropical island recalls him to an (unsatisfactory) reconsideration of the truth which he has left behind. Other works, too, echoed the Catholicism whose certainties Lodge continued to drift away from. In Therapy (1995), the protagonist’s marriage fails and so he seeks out his first girlfriend, whom he met at a Catholic youth club. He discovers that she is on pilgrimage to Compostela, and pursues her.

Lodge had an innate affinity for the English Catholic novels of Greene and his near contemporaries. Many of his earlier novels’ characters were scrupulous, Mass-going Catholics; his later ones reflected more secular attitudes and a laissez-faire approach to the sacraments. His own judgement was that they represented a chronological shift from orthodoxy to liberalism. Like his own journey, his characters began conventionally devout and became “less and less so as time went on” and as the books appeared.

In later life, Lodge denied that Adam and Barbara Appleby’s marriage corresponded to his own. Nevertheless, he conceded that “it would be idle to pretend that I would have thought of writing the novel if we had not, in the early years of our married life, found (like most of our married Catholic friends) that the only method of family planning sanctioned by the Church, known as ‘rhythm’ or the ‘safe method’, was in practice neither rhythmical nor safe, and, therefore, a cause of considerable stress.”

The late scholar-Jesuit Fr Philip Endean observed that Lodge’s writing could be “a powerful experience for British Catholics above a certain age because it plays on our ambivalences…We know that the religious anxiety so common among the pious a generation ago was just silly. Yet still, deep down, it can exert a captivating force on us.” His characters were normal people, trying to live normal lives but thrown into tragicomic situations by Vatican edicts that could appear by turn challenging, difficult or ludicrous.

His output was not limited to Catholic fiction. Lodge was sufficiently transatlantic in his outlook to write campus novels that touched on life in the United States as well. Academia was his other great influence; his Rummidge books were loosely based on his experiences as a lecturer at Birmingham. He wrote scholarly tomes on Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, retiring as Professor of English Literature in 1987. Faced with the challenges of advancing age, he sent up his own battle with hearing loss in Deaf Sentence (2008).

In retirement, among many projects, he presented a programme about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela; in a 2015 memoir called Quite a Good Time to Be Born, he recalled the agonising and chaste seven-year-long courtship that preceded his marriage to Mary Jacob in 1959. He and Mary had three children together, one with Down’s syndrome – about whom Lodge wrote movingly and candidly later on.

Lodge’s mantra was that comedy performed “a very valuable hygienic cultural function: it makes sure that institutions are always subject to a kind of ridiculing criticism”. The Church was no exception. But despite his wavering commitment to formal belief, Lodge never quite left institutional Catholicism – nor did he ever quite cease to believe.

His work stands as an affectionate testament to the Catholics who face important difficult decisions day by day in an increasingly hostile world – and especially to those who fail and fail, but keep on trying.

Photo: David Lodge. (Image by Robert Sharp/English Pen/FLICKR.)

This article appears in the February 2025 magazine edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking and high-calibre magazine and have independent, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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