SOURCE: “The British Museum Is Falling Down: Or Up From Realism,” in The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Southern Illinois University, 1989, pp. 132-41.

In the following essay, Morace discusses Lodge's parody of Catholic sexuality and his sophisticated use of literary allusions in The British Museum Is Falling Down. Morace notes that in this postmodern novel Lodge debunks the authority of the Catholic Church and literary convention, particularly that of realism, to great comic effect.

The British Museum Is Falling Down is another of Lodge’s double novels—double not in its structure (as in the case of Ginger, You’re Barmy) but in its very texture. On the one hand the novel tells the comic story of a day in the life of twenty-five-year-old Adam Appleby, a post-graduate student who knows he will not finish his thesis—on the long sentence in three modern English...