SOURCE: “Flying High,” in Commonweal, May 22, 1992, pp. 23-4.

In the following review, Wheeler offers a positive assessment of Paradise News.

David Lodge has returned to familiar territory—sex and the fences Catholicism seems to throw about it. This is a love story, a status report on the minds of late twentieth-century theologians, an allegory of modern tourist practices as pilgrimage, and finally a meditation on finality: of the four last things, death, judgment, heaven and hell, only death is certain. The other three items get marginal restatement in a quotation from Unamuno by way of Reader’s Digest.

This is so deeply Catholic a book it is a wonder that it is not religious. No, Paradise News is a literary novel, as previous works by the former professor of English at Birmingham University (U.K.) have led us to expect. The hero, Bernard Walsh, very much in the...