Introduction

In his novel How Far Can You Go? David Lodge presents a witty and amusing, but also deeply serious and at times profoundly moving, portrait of a group of English middle-class Roman Catholics as they move from the restrained stability of their student days in the early 1950s, through the turbulent excitement of the 1960s, and into the complexities and ambiguities of the mid 1970s. Along the way, the various characters are confronted with the dissolution of the distinctive, disciplined and precisely defined Catholic subculture of their youth and early adulthood in which their Catholic duties, beliefs and obligations were clearly and meticulously set down. In its place there emerges a very different Catholicism: less distinctive and much closer to the mainstream of both religious and cultural life in modern Britain; no longer disciplined and precisely defined in its beliefs and obligations but, rather, amorphous, ambiguous and pluralistic in nature. Thus Lodge’s novel is also a portrait of an entire religious community and tradition in transition (Lodge, 1980a; 1980b, pp.187–8).