How Far Can You Go?

How Far Can You Go?

Infobox Book |
name = How Far Can You Go?
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = David Lodge
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher =
release_date = 1980
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (hardcover, paperback)
pages =
isbn =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"How Far Can You Go?" (1980) is a novel by British writer and academic David Lodge. It was renamed "Souls and Bodies" when published in the United States.It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award (1980), and went straight into paperback in Penguin Books in 1981.

Plot summary

The book deals with the intersecting lives of a group of English Catholics from their college years in the early 1950s up to the late 1970s. The characters are confronted with a wide range of issues and experiences including marriage, contraception, adultery, sickness, loss, and, most important of all, the changes in the Roman Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council and the papal encyclical against contraception, "Humanae Vitae" (1968).

The title's meaning is twofold: it is on the one hand a reference to how far you ought to go with a member of the other sex before marriage, but also to the question of disorientation in the face of abrupt changes in the Church within only a few years.

Major themes

The novel is a bitterly funny satire on life for young English Catholics in the 1950s and 1960s, depicting them juggling the pressures of youth, sexual desire and the modern world with rigid rules about the avoidance of pleasures, the shame of disappointing Christ and the Virgin, and the fear of hell. Yet it also describes how the loss of faith leads to disorientation and sadness in the characters.

References


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