PARADIGM OR PERIOD PIECE? DAVID LODGE'S HOW FAR CAN YOU GO ? IN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

It Is Now over a decade since the publication of How Far Can You Go?, David Lodge's astutely observant, often wickedly amusing, but also deeply serious novel of English Catholic life from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s.1 Although by no means Lodge's first attempt to construct a fictional narrative with post-war English Catholicism as its principal subject, How Far Can You Go? was certainly—and to date remains—Lodge's most ambitious and far-ranging exploration of this theme.2 The scope of How Far Can You Go? is, indeed, ambitious, for it attempts nothing less than a narrative of the various stages in the transition (or rather transitions) of a group of a dozen or so central characters from a rather narrow and essentially obedient, if also somewhat grudging and perplexed, acceptance of Catholic religious authority and tradition in their student days of the early 1950s; through the experience of an extraordinary expansion of their options both secular and religious in the 1960s; down to a point in the mid-1970s at which the relative uniformity and order of their Catholic identity of the early 1950s has given way to a remarkable plurality (or even perhaps chaos) of alternative ways of being Catholic in the mid-70s. Along the way, the various characters discover first the desire, then the possibility, and finally the necessity to 'choose for themselves' in matters of lifestyle, of morality and of religion—even if the final choice for some of them is a return to a more or less traditional version of their Catholic faith.