Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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This candid but affectionate portrait, by one who came to know him only too well, is concerned with a single episode in his sensational career. And yes, I’m doing well with the old classics list – this is my 9th review with another to follow in the next fortnight. The character of Mr Norris was inspired by the memoirist, critic and internationalist, Gerald Hamilton, a friend of Isherwood’s from his Berlin days. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them. Norris is a serial fabricant, incapable of facing or telling the truth about his business dealings, his past or his financial realities; he’s a really amusing character.

The story is rather long-winded and tame for most of this novel and it seems to be going nowhere for far too long in my humble opinion, riveting it is not.

Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs, or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. His delicate white hand fiddled incessantly with the signet ring on his little finger; his uneasy blue eyes kept squinting rapid glances into the corridor. Some very light spotting to preliminaries, and soil spot to bottom edge, but pages otherwise clean and unmarked. Hamilton was served time in prison for bankruptcy, theft, being a threat to national security, and, interestingly, numbered amongst his friends not only Isherwood himself, but the unlikely combination of Winston Churchill and Aleister Crowley! This is one of Isherwood’s pre-war Berlin novels (this one published in 1935) which capture his experiences of the city at the time leading up to WW2.

I read a handful of these short little Isherwood novels years ago, and this one and A Single Man were the two that I most appreciated. M Godding Books Ltd is an internet book business running from Wiltshire and sending books all over the world every working day. Norris uses Bradshaw as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend of his, Baron Pregnitz, to take a holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a Dutchman.I get the feeling from Max’s review that there are some differences between Cabaret and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (which I’ve yet to read) so maybe you’ll be okay with the novels. He clearly does not have a great deal of faith in the Communists, who are almost as much schemers as the Nazis. In subsequent novels Isherwood changed the narrator's name to "Christopher Isherwood", having come to regard "William Bradshaw" as a "foolish evasion". At one point in the novel, Bradshaw reflects on his impressions of Mr Norris, a very telling passage as it turns out.