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Feb. 9th, 2014 08:46 pm
Gimme shelter
Before starting Out of the shelter, the only David Lodge novel I'd read was Small world, a free-wheeling satire of modern academia. This could hardly be a more different work: a serious Bildungsroman based on an adolescent visit to post-WWII Germany. It's divided into three sections: a grim description of life during the Blitz and the meagre years which followed, a tale of high-living among Germany's American occupiers, and the grueling overland journey which functions as a transition between the two.
Somewhat unexpectedly, I found I responded best to the middle section, which strongly recalled my own experiences. There are plenty of differences between the POV characters's first experience of Germany and mine: He's 16 and unsure of his educational path; I was 20 and already halfway finished with university. He goes for pleasure; I went to study. He speaks no German; I'd been learning it for three years and had been reading and discussing Brecht and Mann. He views the Germans as resentful enemies; I saw them as curious ancestors. He's a sexually-repressed Catholic boy who's never so much as fooled around; I was...well, I didn't say we had nothing in common.
He's also--thanks to his hardscrabble wartime upbringing--aged beyond his years and spends most of his trip in the company of his adult sister's friends, so our experiences weren't as far apart as they might've been. But 1951 is still light-years from 1990, making the American characters in the novel almost as enigmatic to me as they were to the young protagonist (although I did manage to spot the straight-acting homo pair--the sympathetic villains of the piece--pretty easily). As for the Germans I was so eager to associate with, they hardly play a role. Like rain in England, they're a depressing part of the landscape which inconveniences you but doesn't prevent you from getting out and having a good time.
And they do have a good time. To tell the truth, I was a bit envious. Though I eventually returned to Germany as a well-off traveller, I've never entirely gotten over the memory of my penny-pinching undergrad existence. It was a bit disappointing how abruptly the narrative ceases. At one point, the protagonist's sister explains her prolonged absence from London by cataloguing all the miseries of deprivations of their struggling parents' cramped flat, seemingly oblivious to the sad fact of her brother's need to return there. I was curious for an account of his difficult homecoming, but instead it leaps to an epilogue in the USA a decade-and-a-half later.
The description of life in Attlee's England was one of the most interesting and, at the same time, tedious parts of the book. I had no idea how different things were for the Brits after the war, that rationing continued for a full decade after D-Day while Americans were enjoying a surge in prosperity unlike anything anyone alive had ever known. At the same time, the drabness and narrow horizons of a child brought to up expect little and be content with less so depressed me that I set the book down for over a month before taking it up again.
Somewhat unexpectedly, I found I responded best to the middle section, which strongly recalled my own experiences. There are plenty of differences between the POV characters's first experience of Germany and mine: He's 16 and unsure of his educational path; I was 20 and already halfway finished with university. He goes for pleasure; I went to study. He speaks no German; I'd been learning it for three years and had been reading and discussing Brecht and Mann. He views the Germans as resentful enemies; I saw them as curious ancestors. He's a sexually-repressed Catholic boy who's never so much as fooled around; I was...well, I didn't say we had nothing in common.
He's also--thanks to his hardscrabble wartime upbringing--aged beyond his years and spends most of his trip in the company of his adult sister's friends, so our experiences weren't as far apart as they might've been. But 1951 is still light-years from 1990, making the American characters in the novel almost as enigmatic to me as they were to the young protagonist (although I did manage to spot the straight-acting homo pair--the sympathetic villains of the piece--pretty easily). As for the Germans I was so eager to associate with, they hardly play a role. Like rain in England, they're a depressing part of the landscape which inconveniences you but doesn't prevent you from getting out and having a good time.
And they do have a good time. To tell the truth, I was a bit envious. Though I eventually returned to Germany as a well-off traveller, I've never entirely gotten over the memory of my penny-pinching undergrad existence. It was a bit disappointing how abruptly the narrative ceases. At one point, the protagonist's sister explains her prolonged absence from London by cataloguing all the miseries of deprivations of their struggling parents' cramped flat, seemingly oblivious to the sad fact of her brother's need to return there. I was curious for an account of his difficult homecoming, but instead it leaps to an epilogue in the USA a decade-and-a-half later.
The description of life in Attlee's England was one of the most interesting and, at the same time, tedious parts of the book. I had no idea how different things were for the Brits after the war, that rationing continued for a full decade after D-Day while Americans were enjoying a surge in prosperity unlike anything anyone alive had ever known. At the same time, the drabness and narrow horizons of a child brought to up expect little and be content with less so depressed me that I set the book down for over a month before taking it up again.