Not read this, picked up from my parents when they were having a book clear out.

Posted to Wormyone - RABCK.

Thanks PsychJo. Another one off my wish list. Yippee! My Dad, who is Roman Catholic and would have been in his twenties at about the time this book is set, once told me that he'd enjoyed this book, finding that it resonated hilariously with his own experiences.

Here's the blurb for potential subsequent readers:

"How far could they go? On one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society. And with the advent of COC (Catholics for an Open Church), the social lubrication of the pill and the disappearance of hell, it was difficult for Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the others not to rupture their spiritual virginity on the way to the seventies.

How far did they go? Find out in this razor-sharp novel ablaze with mordant insight and comic despair".

It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

The cover art is different from that shown here.

I quite enjoyed this amusing dissection of the madness that is the Roman Catholic church’s repressive teaching on sex and sexuality, particularly as I was brought up Roman Catholic myself (though by my time the teachings were not as strict/ridiculous as in the 1950s. The fact that the church can change its teachings undermines further its credibility for me. It’s like a washing powder that is constantly being advertised as “new and improved” suggesting that the previous version, which was marketed so enthusiastically in the past, was flawed. If the church no longer stands by its previous teachings, how can church members believe that the current teaching is the absolute moral position that the church claims it to be?)

Ironically, since the book is lampooning dated teachings on sexuality, it is dated itself: it contains several clichés of the 70s novel (e.g. the innocent English girl discovering sex while working as an au pair in Italy).

I had expected Roman Catholic sexual repression to be an underlying theme within the novel rather than its overt focus. The book is a touch one-dimensional and the characters are not highly developed: we learn little more about them other than their attitudes to, and experiences of, sex. In truth, the book is less of a novel than simply a dissection of the “mischievous nonsense” propagated by the Roman Catholic church, and the effects of this. I’ve got no problem with the arguments Lodge is making – I agree with all he says – but I would have preferred the book to have been more of a novel.

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