Читать онлайн «How Far Can You Go?»
Автор Дэвид Лодж
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1: How It Was
2: How They Lost Their Virginities
3: How Things Began to Change
4: How They Lost the Fear of Hell
5: How They Broke Out Away Down Up Through Etc.
6: How They Dealt with Love and Death
7: How It Is
Copyright
About the Book
Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there’s Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?
About the Author
David Lodge’s novels include
ALSO BY DAVID LODGE
Fiction
Criticism
Essays
Drama
To Ian Gregor
What can we know? Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?
What ought we to do? Why do what we do? Why and to whom are we finally responsible?
What may we hope? Why are we here? What is it all about?
What will give us courage for life and what courage for death?
Hans Küng,
1
How It Was
IT IS JUST after eight o’clock in the morning of a dark February day, in this year of grace nineteen hundred and fifty-two. An atmospheric depression has combined with the coal smoke from a million chimneys to cast a pall over London. A cold drizzle is falling on the narrow, nondescript streets north of Soho, south of the Euston Road.
Inside the church of Our Lady and St Jude, a greystone, neo-gothic edifice squeezed between a bank and a furniture warehouse, it might still be night. The winter daybreak is too feeble to penetrate the stained-glass windows, doubly and trebly stained by soot and bird droppings, that depict scenes from the life of Our Lady, with St Jude, patron of lost causes, prominent in the foreground of her Coronation in Heaven. In alcoves along the side walls votive candles fitfully illuminate the plaster figures of saints paralysed in attitudes of prayer or exhortation. There are electric lights in here, dangling from the dark roof on immensely long leads, like lamps lowered down a well or pit-shaft; but, for economy’s sake, only a few have been switched on, above the altar and over the front central pews where the sparse congregation is gathered. As they murmur their responses (it is a dialogue mass, a recent innovation designed to increase lay participation in the liturgy) their breath condenses on the chill, damp air, as though their prayers were made fleetingly visible before being sucked up into the inscrutable gloom of the raftered vault.
