The Picturegoers (1960) is the first novel by British writer David Lodge.
The novel relates the story of a group of Roman Catholics residing in London.[1] It interweaves scenes at and near Brickley Palladium in south-east London with characters like Mark Underwood, a Catholic undergraduate, and Clare representing different attitudes to religion. The novel delves into their relationship of Mark and Clare and the tension that starts to redefine their personalities.[2] Movies are used as a touchstone for exploring Catholic values in a changing world, where the cinema introduces values and behaviours from the greater society that differ from those of the traditional community. Various characters are portrayed, representing, to a certain extent, common types of people in a small earlyish twentieth-century British London neighbourhood, though the focus is on one lower-middle-class family.
