Catholic Fiction

Snakes and Ladders

David Lodge’s Souls and Bodies won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1980. Whether it deserved such an honor or not, it is certainly a well-crafted account of British Catholicism circa the era of Vatican II.

Lodge charts the spiritual growth (“decay” might be more accurate) of a group of British men and women from their university days through young adulthood, blossoming careers, marriages, children, marital affairs, and on into middle age. Their development coincides with the innovations to the liturgy introduced by the Second Vatican Council, and Lodge charts their spiritual progress, or lack thereof, with such provocative chapter titles as “How They Lost Their Virginities” and “How They Lost the Fear of Hell.”  

Souls and Bodies, as its title might suggest, deals with the constant tension between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane, the eternal and the ephemeral. More specifically, Lodge examines the ramifications of birth control that resulted from the Sixties Sexual Revolution set against the backdrop of Vatican II. It’s a book about sex, is what I’m trying to say, and how a handful Catholics struggle to reconcile the tenets of a two-thousand year old religion with the vicissitudes of modern, sexually “liberated” life. Each of Lodge’s characters must reexamine their faith in light of the proliferation of prophylactics and the ubiquity of the Pill. As a reader born post-Vatican II, I was intrigued by Lodge’s account of the clash between Orthodoxy and Modernity (or Catholicism versus Contraception), since I have grown up oblivious to the magnitude of the changes in attitude since the Council.   

Unfortunately, I was less compelled by the story itself than the historical backdrop of the narrative. As I write, having just finished the book, I can only dimly recall the characters: Weak, concupiscent Michael; distant, frigid Angela; homosexual aesthete Miles; frustrated, seeking Ruth. Lodge has a somewhat fatalistic view of the human condition—his characters change very little over the course of the novel. Their main, distinguishing traits are established in the first chapter and little departed from thereafter.

The lack of dimension might be owed to Lodge having adopted the tricky third-person omniscient narrative voice. Basically, Lodge is God of this microcosmic fictional universe. He gives equal weight to his entire dramatis personae, male and female, faithful and rebellious, dropping into their lives when and where he will. He even rather discomfitingly interjects his own voice as author, David Lodge, into the proceedings. When mentioning the "Rhythm and Safe" method (which he points out “in practice is neither rhythmical or safe”), he adds “I have written about this before, a novel about a penurious young Catholic couple whose attempts to apply the Safe Method have produced three children in as many years…”

Well, that’s all very interesting, but it took me right out of the story at hand, the story Lodge is supposed to be telling. He proceeds to travel down a further tangent about how that particular novel of his was translated into Czech, eliciting a very kind, if grammatically tenuous, fan letter from one Mr. Jerhot. Again, charming, but the effect is as jarring as getting shaken awake while enjoying a pleasant doze. No doubt this is intentional on Lodge’s part, but one gets the impression that he is straining a little too hard to be counted among the “postmodern” novelists of his generation, like Anthony Burgess or John Fowles. Formalist tricks tend to grow tiring the more one sees them, especially when they don’t have any bearing on the story at hand.   

Lodge does, however, have the advantage of that distinctively entertaining British humor: subtle, wry and dry as dust. A good example of this appears in his impish summary of Catholic dogma as compared to the board game, Snakes and Ladders. It’s worth quoting at length:

The name of the game was Salvation, the object to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders: sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light…On the whole, a safe rule of thumb was that anything positively disliked doing was probably Good, and anything you liked doing enormously was probably Bad, or potentially bad—an “occasion of sin”…Mortal sins were huge snakes that sent you slithering back to square one, because if you died in a state of mortal sin, you went to Hell. If, however, you confessed your sins and received absolution through the sacrament of Penance, you shot up the ladder of grace to your original position on the board…”

Explaining the metaphysics of the Catholic faith in terms of a game of Snakes and Ladders is clever, to be sure, but I doubt it will make its way into any theology curricula, let alone Sunday schools.    

Apart from its amusing moments of characteristically dry British humor, Souls and Bodies works best as an artifact—what historians would call a “primary source document”—of the upheavals during Vatican II from the perspective of Catholic men and women experiencing it directly and trying to come to terms with its ramifications in their day-to-day lives. Appropriately enough, then, the novel ends with David Lodge learning of the election of John Paul II, “the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular – but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now?”  

Good question.