Rating: 
Summary: Very funny with a serious core -- enjoyable and thoughtful
Review: _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.
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