_The British Museum is Falling Down_, published in 1965, is the book in which David Lodge seems to have found his metier -- the comic novel. It also reflects Lodge's Catholicism (as with his later books) -- in this case particularly the frustrations of sincere Roman Catholics with the Church's prohibition on birth control.

The novel is set during one day in the life of Adam Appleby. Adam is working on his Ph. D. thesis in English Literature, and he goes in every day to the British Museum to research his subject. He is also married with three young children. He dreads the prospect of another, but he and his wife are practicing Roman Catholics, and thus are restricted to the "Safe Method" of birth control -- basically an advanced version of the Rhythm Method. But this morning his wife is now three days late for her period.

Adam's day is very funnily detailed, as he basically gets nothing done on his thesis, between problems with his motor scooter, worry about his wife being pregnant, and various misadventures, involving a fire scare, a sherry party, and a visit to the aging niece of a minor Catholic novelist on whom Adam is something of an expert. The book is short, cleverly written, very smartly plotted. Lodge includes sections parodying the work of a number of well-known writers, such as Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway. The characters -- Adam, his wife, his friends Camel and Pond, the novelist's niece and her daughter, a fire-breathing Irish priest, etc. -- are delightfully portrayed. It's not as substantial a book as such later novels as _Changing Places_ or _Paradise News_, but it's great fun.

This is Lodge's third novel and first comedy, written while he was a young lecturer on a fellowship in the U.S.; while it's much more narrow and not nearly as subtle as his later work, it's still pretty good. There's a good deal of slapstick but more pastiche and sly satire, and Lodge's ear for hilarious dialogue is very evident. The subject matter, however, is now rather outdated, as it concerns the trials and tribulations of a young English Catholic couple who can't quite bring themselves to rebel against the Church's teachings regarding birth control. With three young children in four years of marriage, and now the threat of a fourth pregnancy, both of them are economically and psychologically despondent and sexually frustrated from trying to follow the Rhythm Method. The author himself is Catholic, and one has to wonder if he still believes as he apparently did then.

Still, this story of Adam and Barbara Appleby, which spans a single day of Adam's attempts to carry on his thesis research in the Reading Room of the British Museum, raises all the questions of authority vs. conscience that concerned Vatican II. Lodge even manages to bring about a classic comedic denouement without it seeming contrived. Good "historical" reading for the Lodge afficionado. The Penguin edition also includes a revealing introduction by the author discussing the story behind the novel and the themes he was attempting to address.

Adam Appleby's day of feared pregnancy will bring a smile to the face of any reader who is old enough, or Catholic enough to remember what life before contraception was like. This little book is full of high fiction wit and academic delight. I recommend it warmly.

_Paradise News_ concerns Bernard Walsh, a defrocked Anglo-Catholic priest who is teaching theology half-time at a depressing college in a depressing English town. His aunt contacts him from Hawaii with the news that she is dying, and that she would like him to convince his father (her brother) to visit her, at her expense, for one last time. They have not met since the '50s, for insufficiently explained reasons, though the scandal over Aunt Ursula first marrying, then divorcing, an American serviceman might have something to do with it.

Bernard's father is a disagreeable old man who is afraid of flying, but somehow, with the unexpected help of Bernard's scheming sister Tess, who is afraid of losing Ursula's fabled inheritance, he is convinced to go. Bernard lucks into a last-minute cancellation of a tourist package, getting the two of them a cheap flight, and more to the point of the book, allowing Lodge to portray a wide variety of English tourists, to a variety of comic effect. Some of the thematic center of the book is provided by an academic, an anthropologist of tourism, who has various cockeyed theories about the ritualistic place of tourism in human life, and who is much taken with the repeated motif of "Paradise" in the names of Hawaiian tourist traps. The other thematic center, of course, revolves around Bernard's own loss of faith, and the stories of his rigid Catholic upbringing, his seminary training, his years teaching, and his brief time as a parish priest.

In Hawaii, Bernard's father is almost immediately run down by a car. So Bernard's time is taken up with dealing with his father's hospitalization, and then with Aunt Ursula's situation, partly in a shabby nursing house, partly in hospital. Bernard must deal with finding a place for Ursula to live out her short expected term, and this in the light of her rather more straitened than expected circumstances. Bernard also meets and falls in love with the woman who ran over his father, a woman in the process of divorcing her husband, who hates Hawaii, but who proves just the right woman for an ex-priest whose only sexual experience has consisted of humiliating failure. We also get glimpses of the other English tourists, these functioning mostly as pretty effective comic relief.

I enjoyed this novel very much. It's both very funny, and quite serious at core. It's well-written, the characters are very well delineated, and their stories are involving and moving. The serious aspects -- the exploration of faith, and paradise, and, yes, tourism, are interesting and intelligent. The only quibbles I'd have would be the convenient resolution of some difficulties: some financial difficulties, and also the easy coincidence of Bernard's "meet cute" with an appropriate woman. But, to be sure, those are conventions of comedy, to some extent.

In Paradise News, David Lodge does something unusual. His main character is a forty-something virgin, sexually inhibited and celibate by force of habit. Perhaps more uncommon, Bernard is an honest man. He's even a somewhat boring, ordinary man, not particularly neurotic or troubled, and yet still cabable of growth over the course of the novel. More extraordinary still, Lodge gives us a sensible love story and sensible sex. How often do we see that? It makes a refreshing change. But for those who don't think an honest man with moral concerns getting a sensible--if much overdue--introduction to sex and falling in love in a sensible way doesn't sound interesting, think again. Lodge is always worth reading. He entertains (funny situations; the wish fulfillment story of how Bernard's aunt ends the book better off than she started it) and he provokes thought (among other things, vacationing as the modern-day pilgrimage, a pursuit of paradise).

The only strikes against this book are that it starts off a bit slow, focusing at first on characters you know will be minor. It picks up speed quickly enough, but the minor characters are perhaps not all they could be--a small concern really, when they are better than many writers would have managed. And the incest theme lacks punch. It may be a sad commentary on the cynicism and jaded sensibilities of my generation when one of us can say, "Ho hum, incest again", but that's the way it is. The incest serves its purpose in the novel, but that whole subplot just wasn't as interesting as the larger story of Bernard's renewal. And as that IS intersting, Paradise News is well worth reading.

David Lodge is one of the most gifted writers around and Paradise News is one of his best books.
Bernard is an ex-priest who who left the priesthood after realizing that he was and always had been an atheist. His decision to leave the priesthood (which he entered as an adolescent) leaves him with no real meaning in his life until his aunt calls him to her deathbed. With his father, Bernard travels half-way around the world (from England to Hawaii) in an attempt to reconcile his father and his aunt. In doing so, he discovers who he is and what he has been searching for.
The themes in this book (pedophilia/sex abuse, unresolved sexuality among young priests etc.) are especially timely right now but even without these themes the book has an incredible pull and power.

David Lodge's Small World is an amusing, entertaining look at the world of academia, particularly the world of English literature, and all of the ridiculous people who inhabit it. I truly enjoy Lodge's work, but I have to say, this isn't my favorite. It's still terrific, but, in my opinion, not his strongest work. It starts off a little slow and many of the characters, while funny, are a bit predictable. I also think this novel didn't really stand the test of time. That being said, it is a funny and engaging read, certain to make you chuckle and even laugh out loud. It's just not Lodge's best work, but Lodge on a bad day is still infinitely better than most other writers on a good day.

Close behind a delightful read of Lodge's "Trading places", I quickly moved to the second part of his trilogy. "Places" was very good and "World" is even better.

Moving ahead ten years in time from "Places", Lodge shows an absolutely superb ability to mesh the globe-trotting, incestuous, backbiting and networking world of university professors of literature. Zapp and Swallow are back for a colorful encore. For any well-traveled academic, or even those who travel for other reasons, you will enjoy Lodge's descriptions, insights and surprising intricacies, as characters jet across continents to yet another subsidized conference, never forgetting that the rationale for the conference is not what it is advertised to be. As any professional, well-published academic knows, the real reason to write papers to present at conferences is to be able to justify traveling to the conference where most if not all agree that there is little reason to actually read or listen to the presentations.

Yet beyond the trysts and tripe of these fools can be found lessons in life and romance, of the great pursuit of life. Look past the lust, the deception and the pettiness, as Lodge presents plenty of food for thought.

Lodge colors his well-drawn players with all the affectations of their profession: greed, pettiness, ego, banality. A wonderful job. "Small world" is a great, most pleasant summer escape, a humorous jab at the soft underbelly of college life -- without ever really teaching a course.

From 'Changing Places' through 'Small World' to 'Nice Work', and from 'How Far You Can Go' through 'Paradise News' to 'Therapy', David Lodge, who is a successor of one of the best parts of the tradition of British novels-- the human relationships in society and a lot of comical accidents by the clumsiness of the thoughts and acts, continued to make brilliant novels, along the 2 lines--1) the humor generated by university life or academism itself 2) the sexual freedom and the matter about Catholicism.

One of the most impressive reviews on Lodge I have ever read is that one is happy because one has a contemporary writer of one's own and can grow older and have more knowledge of life with him .

I reread his many novels this year. I enjoyed 'Small World' most because of its fullness and richness, an ardent lover and une belle dame sans merci, and funny, facetious situations, and 'Paradise News' because of the sympathy aroused by the hero and the paradisiacal Hawaii. Every time I read, I am fascinated by his prose: its wit and the way he uses relatives or a participle construction. I wait for a Lodge new novel as eagerly as, or more eagerly than a Pinchon's.

I would like to review of "Therapy" by David Lodge, a post-modernist writer, who is also Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham and a famous literary critic. "Therapy" is the first book I have read by this author and it made a deep impression on me for Lodge's excellent writing skills. My attention was immediately captured and held throughout the novel. The book is a brilliant, hilarious, first-person introspection, an exceptionally moving story that leaves the reader laughing and thinking at the same time. The main character is Tubby Passmore, a successful TV sitcom screenwriter whose creeping mid-life crisis has turned him into a therapy-addict. With the help of Kierkegaard's philosophy, which promoted the centrality of individual choice, he tries to get rid of his latent ANGST. All the other characters are so amazingly well developed that I had a clear picture of them in my mind. I think that the meeting with the pious Maureen, Tubby's first girlfriend, and the final, clarifying exchange of views with the self-assured Sally, his athletic ex-wife, are the most resolutive, turning point of his life, because they give Tubby the opportunity to reflect on his past years, on his mistakes, and push him to understand himself better and to find the key to his problems. In conformity with post-modernist techniques, Lodge uses here different styles, in which he gradually reflects the change in point of view. The language is however very simple and colloquial, although hilariously amusing. I would suggest this book to anybody who is looking for an intelligent, involving and, at the same time, funny book, because "Therapy" is a well written comic story with a strong moral teaching which captures the spirit of human subconscious.

But the only happy marriage in this novel is the one between satire and sensitivity. I had expected comedy and satire throughout, but, though Lodge gives us a good dose of it, the book turns poignant and touching. I think I was in love with Maureen by the conclusion. I read the book initially with reluctance because it had been, as I viewed it, foisted off on me by a book club. I ended thoroughly caught up and engrossed, even shaken at times. I am in that book. He did he know me?

This is an excellent novel by a master of the comic serious, David Lodge. The story is covered in the back cover and other reviews, but I would add that the meaning of this novel and its structure are among the most innovative and genuinely engaging I have seen. Many postmodern novels, a term at which no doubt David Lodge would wince, are structured to allow the reader to impose his own understanding of the facts through intricate structures; but rarely are they deeply engaging. The average comic novel, though entertaining, has little to say. This work has both an elusive structure and engaging comic touches. It also has something important to say. It has the potential to become a work read 50 to 100 years from now despite the topical references to mid 1990's Britain. I won't spoil it for you because all will be revealed. Suffice it to say that our protagonist chooses to live in the present rejecting the despair of the unrecoverable past and the hopeless future.

Regardless of your conditions, life does not have to be place of limitations. Among the many topics which this novel is about, this one seems to me the most striking one.

Timothy is a young fellow, with a very conservative father. The latter is afraid of modifying its daily routines and by the same token, is having a hard time understanding why his children will want something different of life than what he suggests. Not even the war changes him a bit.

Nevertheless, Timothy is willing to take risks although pushed a little bit by the example and funds of his sister, who left the family house to join the US army as a secretary, and is not willing under any circumstances to return to the dark and humid rooms of her home or the supervision of her parents

When Timothy arrives to Germany a country which was ten times more destructed than England he is shocked not only by the affluence of material goods that he can find in the US Army camps located there. He is also surprised by the spirit of its people. Willing to forget the past, and more than that anxious to lift its country from the bits and pieces that remained. While England although it won the war, remains a place were its politicians are unwilling to recognize that life will never be as before and for the same reason seem incapable to react and find solutions to their lack of material wealth.

While living in Hildelberg, Timothy will find not only that he alone is capable of directing its life but also to understand the basic need of freedom that guided the acts of his sister.

Those are reflected in the abandonment of its catholic affiliation, her economic independence, her flirtations with several guys at the same time and finally the taking of a casual lover.

What surprises Timothy the most is that she is not broken by this open defiance of family and British social rules, but actually that her life is fun, fulfilling and more interesting.

And when he synchronizes in the same frame of mind, life also opens up for him.

As a professor, I used this book when teaching a class on British history. It's one of my favorite books and my students loved it as well. Lodge is an incredibly gifted writer and his ability to evoke the more painful aspects of adolescence (while letting you see the amusing side of it as well) is fantastic. It also provides a wonderful insight into American culture and our consumer-minded society.

A teenager from an overly respectable family in the cramped restricted England of 1951 gets a glimpse of the good life lived by affluent Americans in Germany. Having lived in Britain and visited Germany in the fifties and come to America in the sixties I could identify with much of it. Lodge tries to use the US/UK contrast to make a point about the uses of adversity and the trauma of poverty. The problem with this is that, as a paradigm of restrictiveness and backwardness the England of 1951 wasn't that bad. I meet people now in the US from Bangladesh, Egypt, Haiti and points East and South for whom the culture shock of American wealth and freedom is infinitely greater. Fiction may not be the right vehicle for the point he wants to make. I understood more from the introduction (in which he suggests that the poverty of 1950's Britain was due to government policies)and the epilog. In the introduction he mentions an epilog by Don Kowalski that was excised from the original edition and has not been reinstated in this one. It would be interesting to read that.

The book is a marvellous commentary on the 20th Centuary Catholic Church and contraception - highlighting, often comically, the Church's own contradictions and dead end arguments - whilst maintaining the reader's understanding of why and how people avidly follow doctrines that are often detrimental to them, until they hopefully force change and growth. It will amuse and enlighten non, lapsed and practicing Catholics. But BEWARE, "Souls & Bodies" is the SAME book as "How Far Can You Go?".

The book is great, but only the cover and the title make it different from the book 'How far can you go' from David. Still it Christianity living on the edge!

David Lodge's story of a group of British Roman Catholics passing through Vatican II is by turns funny, touching, and sad. But it's the humor that lingers -- not the surface-level "don't nuns look funny?" stuff that usually passes for Catholic jokes, but smart, pointed humor that comes from an intimate knowledge of the joy, pain, absurdity, and glory of wrestling with a two-thousand-year-old religion and struggling to reconcile it with everyday life in a changing world. Example: a bright medical student kneeling at Communion, trying not to be preoccupied with the theological implications of the Body of Christ passing through the whole digestive process. But none of the shots are cheap: the attitude toward faith is respectful without knee-jerk acceptance or rejection of orthodox pieties. A brilliant, sensitive, funny, tragic, hopeful, doubting, unforgettable book.

I read Viper's Tangle (I believe my translation was "Nest of Vipers") in high school and became fascinated with Francois Mauriac. I went on to read some of his other works, including "The Desert of Love." This work is psychological and personal in nature. If you enjoy stories which probe characters' minds, this is an excellent choice. An invalid man lies in bed, dying, remembering his life and coming to terms with it, and himself. An unknown classic. Also great if you like to collect obscure literature!

Few Americans realize that Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, or that in his time he was considered to be one of France's greatest men of letters. "Catholic" writers have not been in vogue for some time, and in many of Mauriac's other works, the characters struggle with moral dilemmas that would be considered quaint and old-fashioned by many modern readers. The Viper's Tangle, however, reveals a dying patriarch's attempt to come to terms with alienation from his family and his consuming personal greed, issues that are more universal in scope. The moribund Louis leaves as an inheritance for his forbears not the vast fortunes they expect, but his "meditations" upon his life and the lives of his family. As death and the end of the account approach, Louis undergoes a moral and spiritual transformation, deftly and subtley handled by Mauriac. The crystalline writing survives translation well, and the reader is rewarded with a detailed picture of bourgeois life in 19th century France as well as a stunning psychological portrayal of a fascinating individual.

A brilliant and sucessful layer lays dying. He ruminates over his discovery twenty years earlier that his wife had been passionately in love with another man and had married him for more practical reasons. During these twenty years, he has become more and more detached from and bitter toward his family and he spends his convalescence listening intently to the whispers of his family reaching him from downstairs. They discuss his wealth and his difficult ways.

His only consolation is the contemplation of his final triumph - when, after his death, his family rushes to the safe and instead of the stocks and bonds they are looking for, they find only a letter. The brilliant letter that makes up this incredible book.

I have read this book after its successor "Small World" which I enjoyed very much. And even if it is quite entertaining it does not reach up to the later novel - not at all. It was nice to observe the two protagonists Swallow and Zapp trying to adapt to the way of life at an American respectively British university in the 60s. In describing and satirizing the academic world Lodge is at his best. But having him experimenting with the novel (newspaper clippings make up the center part of the book, a film-script the end) did not seem very convincing in this context. Where the story should really take off it becomes downright boring through this technique. Pale in comparison to "Small World" and "Nice Work", the third book in the series.

It's now nine years since I read Changing Places, and even today I start glowing whenever I see a copy. Personally, I very much prefer Morris Zapp and Euphoric State University to Philipp Swallow or Rummage, but both sides of this hilarious transatlantic parallel are just so funny and heartwarming. Needless to say, I've read every Lodge book since, and Changing Places is clearly the turning point to the great writer he has become.

David Lodge's "Changing Places" had me in stitches. It's such a funny book. The prose is highly readable, crisply written and races along so charmingly that it's hard to put it down once you've started. Although Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp are drawn from the two contrasting cultures they symbolise, they are never allowed to degenerate into caricatures. Both are highly real and believable characters, sharing much the same human frailties. While Zapp is unashamedly direct, hollow and crass, Swallow is rather more reserved, diffident, but with the same potential though not the guts for dishonesty. It is only by "changing places" that they become themselves, albeit in a different environment. Even the behaviour of their wives change when subjected to the opposite cultural influences. Admittedly, the setting of the "exchange" in the late 60s (with all the references to student protests and pot smoking in university campuses) has tended to date the book a bit. But who cares, when you derive such enormous pleasure, laughter and fun from reading what must seem like a novel for the ages. I can see thousands reading it 50 years into the new millenium.

The novel "Nice Work" by David Lodge tells the story of two protagonists.
One is Mr. Vic(tor) Wilcox, the other one is Dr. Robyn Penrose. At first the novel starts by following two main paths: Wilcox' life and Penrose's life. Because of the "In-dustry Year Shadow Scheme", their paths cross and the novel tells the story of Vic and Robyn together. Later it changes again, to how it was before, meaning that two different stories are told but with the difference that the persons' thoughts and actions are (from time to time) related to the knowledge of the other person.

In my opinion, David Lodge has had a very interesting idea. He presents two different characters. One is a rational thinking businessman, the other an emotional thinking, feminist lecturer. Especially the beginning of the novel seems a bit strange and bor-ing because Lodge takes about hundred pages to introduce the characters. He does that in great detail, which in the end is important, because you can understand the characters much better. However, because of missing action the first part is rather not so good. It would have been better, if Lodge had let the characters describe themselves through actions and thoughts, rather than describing them from the per-spective of an omniscient narrator. However the advantage of the more boring way is that you can concentrate on the very details. You are not distracted by some actions. I think that is why the author chose it the way he did.

The following part I like better than the first one. It is interesting to see the develop-ment of the characters when it comes to the stage of the Shadow Scheme.
Robyn, who used to be interested in studies and literature, only starts to get increas-ingly interested in economy and competition. She offers some good ideas and seems like a competent person who is willing to learn something from Vic. She acts in a very clever way (e.g. in Frankfurt in the Restaurant).

The same changes, only vice versa, l apply to Vic. He distances himself a bit from the idea that economy and work is everything in life. He starts to read novels and he of-fers good ideas, too (e.g. in the tutorial). Although he has never really read novels before he enjoys it.
I really liked to see, characters undergo certain changes. Robyn makes changes to-wards a rational way of thinking and Vic to an emotional one. An interesting matter, which should be mentioned as well, is the relation(ship) between him and Robyn. It is interesting that Robyn attracts Vic but he does not attract her. While reading the book and especially the scene in the Frankfurt hotel room, you think that there might be the possibility that something would happen between Vic and Robyn. I, for example, thought that Robyn would start to love Vic (especially after Charles "broke of" with her) and that Vic would get divorced. Probably that is what Lodge intended to do. He wants to show how quickly things can change again. Namely, in the end, Charles comes back to Robyn and Vic realises that Marjorie still loves him and that he loves her.

Until you read the last sentence, you think that Robyn will leave Rummidge in order to go to America and work for Professor Zapp. However, she decides not to when she hears that the Rummidge University can afford her as a lecturer.
Steadfastness is another thing Lodge implies. Vic stands by his family and Robyn by her university.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the book except the boring beginning. It was very interest-ing and it would be good if there was a film to compare it to.

Lodge presents to his readers an intelligent and humorous novel set in an early 1980's Great Britain adjusting to, if not reeling from, the era's Thatcherite reforms. The book's two main protagonists are Vic Wilcox, a business-minded plant manager in the fictional industrial town of Rummidge, and Dr. Robyn Penrose, a college lecturer and feminist deconstructionist at the local liberal arts college. The characters are opposites in each and every aspect of their lives: from family of origin, to type of education, to goals, priorites, tastes in food, pets, and even automobiles. Lodge takes great pains to trace their divergent paths and preferences until the two seridipitously meet through a government plan to bring together academics, who see little use for the polluting and exploiting industrialists, and the business leaders, who conversely see little need for the ivory-tower-produce-nothing-really-useful academics. With smart humor and delicious tension the author weaves a delightful story as Vic and Robyn spar over ideological differences as well as personal preferences. But eventually the government plan's goal is achieved as they both begin to acknowledge and understand the other's point of view. Without spoiling the novel for you, late in the story there are some unexpected plot twists as well as an interesting resolution and conclusion. Definitely a good read.

After I finished grad school, a fellow student bought me this book as a going away gift. She had written on the frontispiece, "This book helps me keep perspective on how the rest of the world sees us academics." It was the first David Lodge book I read, but certainly not the last. Robyn Penrose, Ph.D. in English, has been assigned to shadow Vic Wilcox, factory manager in industrial Rummidge (a fictional version of the English city of Birmingham) for a semester. Of course Mr. Wilcox is going to learn something about feminist criticism; what you might not realize is how much Dr. Penrose will learn about English industry. David Lodge's familiar characters from his other novels, _Changing_Places_ and _Small_World_, are back here in supporting roles. But the real stars here are Robyn and Vic, two people who are very adversarial at first, only to become quite understanding of the other's point of view. Lodge's resolution of his plot seems a bit forced, but the writing is extremely intelligent: Lodge effortlessly provides humorous examples of the seemingly difficult literary theories that Robyn espouses. This book did more for my appreciation of critical theory than anything other text--and without the pain of reading Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, or Julia Kristeva. Anyone who's worked in academia will not only recognize the truth that is contained in this novel; (s)he will also recognize several of the people. Others might wish to start with _Small_World_, but _Nice_Work_ will let you know what you think of David Lodge in short order.

I'm Catholic. I'm a traditionalist. I am convinced there is unspeakable cover-up and corruption going on in the Vatican, with or without the Pope's knowledge, I don't know. However, this book cannot be taken all too seriously. Why? Well, first of all, the author makes it clear that he is a disgruntled liberal who would desperately like to see the Church change her teachings on morality, esp. the prohibition of contraception. He paints Cardinal Luciani, alias Pope John Paul I, as a liberal who wanted to do just that. Is that an accurate picture of John Paul I? I don't know. But I'll tell you this much: I see no reason to trust David Yallop in his characterization.

Secondly, I could not find a SINGLE footnote or citation of anything this man reports in his book. He has countless quotes and makes incredible claims, none of which are backed up. This is what I mean when I say you can't take this man seriously. He is a liberal with an agenda, and since he gives no proof for what he says, I see no reason to believe that what he says is true.

Now, I am quite certain that John Paul I was murdered. I am certain that this had something to do with the Vatican Bank scandal the Pope was about to uncover. And we know for a fact that the Vatican is infiltrated by countless Masons. So, I think that much of what Yallop says is true. But Yallop gives no backup, and his mockery of Catholic doctrine and authority is so obvious that his book is not very convincing in certain areas, esp. where he wants to claim that John Paul I wanted to allow contraception.

Let me give you some evidence of further inconsistency in this book that I believe makes it less than convincing: On page 368, Yallop mentions possible dates of when the plans to murder the Pope could have been put together: "It could have been within the first two weeks of September when the fact that Luciani was investigating Freemasonry within the Vatican became known to some members in the Vatican village. It could have been mid September when the attitudes of the new Pope on birth control and his plans to implement a liberal position on the issue were causing deep concerns in the Vatican."

Well, wait a minute now. The Freemasons ARE liberals. They would like to see nothing more urgent than a Pope approving of contraception! Why, then, would the alleged plans of John Paul I cause deep concern? It would have been perfect for the Masons to see the Pope do just that! After all, they infiltrated the Church in order to subvert her and change her teaching. It is these kinds of things in this book that betray Yallop's agenda, in my opinion, and strip the book of credibility.

This book inlcudes many pictures of John Paul I and important protagonists and nemeses. Despite the critiques I have given, the book is a fascinating read, at least after the introductory chapters. If he had backed up his claims, Yallop's work here could have been a REAL eye-opener. But as it is right now, we have no way of knowing what parts of this book are fact, and what are fiction.

This book raises a number of important questions about the Vatican's financial operations and the circumstances surrounding the surprise death of Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul the First). I will merely pose two of them here. The first, for those who dismiss it as anti-Vatican propaganda, why would the Vatican pass up a chance to clear up the suspicions surrounding the death of Luciani? Certainly an autopsy or else a formal death certificate would do a lot to establish the circumstances surrounding his death. The second question, if this story is true, why does somebody not make a movie out of this story?

If you have not read this book, READ IT! Albino Luciani (John Paul I)was the last chance the Church had of being put on the right track, someone who would work for the people..... instead, the Vatican has ended up working for the corrupt and illegal societies round the world namely P2 and the Mafia. The fact that John Paul I has been erased from Vatican history is evident in the list of Popes in the Vatican City, where John Paul I is not even on the list. Sure, he ruled only for 30 days, but he was still elected Pope. The unanswered questions in this book can only lead you to believe that similar happenings are still going on in the church and when you read the book, its stikes as amazing (and scary) at how fast a society like P2 can grow in power.... if you think they are gone, think twice.... they are probably stronger than ever, with people in high places all round the world influencing political decisions and many other important decisions with only one thing in mind... POWER.... The fact that Albino Luciani was FOR contraception is surely evidence that this man was a thinker who made decisions based on the current cicumstances and times, and that if his policies had gone through, we would have less problems with over-population and sexually transmitted diseases. Albino Luciani would have been a reformer, a good man who would have done much good for the Church. I am not a believer myself, but his death seems to have put the church back rather than forward..... How can you possibly argue against contraception in this day and age?!!! People should read this book and know what happened, and encourage the church to take on the right path... not the path of curruption... We are already ruled by greedy self driven politicians, whereas the church should be a place of neutral stance, it has become as corrupt as the political systems that rule us...