Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home.Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the unfamiliar company of package tourists: honeymooners; young women looking for Mr. Nice; families nuclear and fissile. But it is the island itself that holds the most astonishing surprises, as an accidental encounter ... Read More
Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home.Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the unfamiliar company of package tourists: honeymooners; young women looking for Mr. Nice; families nuclear and fissile. But it is the island itself that holds the most astonishing surprises, as an accidental encounter opens up to Bernard possibilities of life, and love, never dreamed of in his normally overcast habitat. Paradise News is an enchanting--and very funny--portrait of the late flowering of an honest man. Read Less
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Add this copy of Paradise News to cart. $11.69, good condition, Sold by Wonder Book - Member ABAA/ILAB rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Frederick, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1993 by Penguin Books Ltd.
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David Lodge's novel "Paradise News" is a deceptively simple book to read with many important themes. It is the tale of people from England who travel to Hawaii on a charter package for holiday. The main characters are a lapsed Irish priest,(Bernard) who teaches theology, and his crusty aged father who are summoned to Hawaii to visit a long lost sister of the father who is on her deathbed.
The story is a brisk, breezy satire on Hawaii tourism. With the exception of the main theme and characters, much of the story is not well developed. The main theme, as it involves Bernard stresses growth and change after a lapse of belief in religious dogma. It explores the growth of human love and sexuality as Bernard is able to consummate his relationship with a separated woman he meets in Hawaii, comes to terms with his vocation as a theologian, and learns the virtues of love, patience and forgiveness. He comes to appreciate the nature of religious doubt and the attendant spiritual search through human love and through reflections on the human condition as reflected in the works of William Butler Yeats, the Victorian poets, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno, and the Gospel of Matthew, among other sources.
John Updike's novel "In the Beauty of the Lillies" also deals with the lapse of faith by an American Protestant Clergyman. In Updike's book, when faith is lost, all is downhill for the protagonist and his family. I think Lodge's book can be instructively compared with Updike insofar as it raises questions of religion, secularism and sexuality. There is more hope in Lodge's book than I find in Updike's for meaningful human life outside the reach of the creeds.
