Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

I picked up 'Out of the Shelter' in my gorgeous local library, Manor House Gardens. The blurb promised that the protagonist Timmy, who grows up in London under the shadow of the Blitz, would undergo a life-changing rite of passage when his older sister Kath draws him into her "deliriously fast, furious and extravagant life" in occupied Heidelberg. I hoped the bildungsroman would be a sort of 'Catcher in the Rye' meets 'The Great Gatsby'...and wasn't completely disappointed.

The novel is not as glitzy or glamorous as billed. For Timothy, in full bloom as a painfully awkward adolescent, drinking five milkshakes in a row satisfies the inadequacy of his life back in a London ravaged by war and rationing - almost. Only the numerous clumsy encounters with pretty girls are a constant reminder of Timothy's more immediate feelings of lack.

 Relatively untouched by war, Heidelberg graciously provides a picturesque distraction from the damage and destruction caused by Allied bombing in Germany. Certainly, for the Americans who significantly set up base there, life is a ball. The novel excels in its creation of these careless bright young things, for whom of the horrors of war are an obscure fact rarely called to the forefront of consciousness. When Lodge does bring these horrors to our attention, they leave reader all the more shocked and shaken.

I studied World War history over and over again at school, so the historical events outlined in the novel were accurate and familiar. However, like Timothy's drawings of Heidelberg, Lodge attentively sketches in a delicately detailed portrait of the immediate post-war period rarely touched upon.

I guessed at the revelatory ending, but the emotional power of the final pages where Kath reflects on her experiences was not dampened nonetheless. I felt that the epilogue by Lodge, explaining away the book's poor commercial success with the terrible editing of the first edition was a bit disappointing and unnecessary. It was interesting to learn which parts of the novel were autobiographical.

Enjoyable. A cocktail of easy reading, laced with sadness and garnished with a sprig of cringing humour.

My verdict: I preferred Lodge's Literary Criticism in 'The Art of Fiction' but this is worth a read!