Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood – Be Curious Not Judgemental
Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in America as The Last of Mr Norris) is a 1935 novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. An unassuming English tutor, William Bradshaw, describes a friendship with Arthur Norris, a furtive man of refined tastes and straightened circumstances who he meets on a train.
Bradshaw is a quiet observer of Berlin life. He notes how the political powers-that-be are increasingly classifying people as in or out, worthy or unworthy. By contrast, Mr Norris Changes Trains is a work of observation rather than judgement, seeing people as an intricate mixture of attributes. The book is too enigmatic to have a moral as such, set in a world where, ironically, a black and white conception of good and bad has led to moral collapse. You could, however, in a roundabout way, say that Mr Norris Changes Trains is an argument for accepting that life is complicated. It doesn’t shout its message’, and if the bag search in the opening train scene had found Mr Norris Changes Trains, it would scarcely have merited a glance. Only in this manner could the book cross the border and in its own sly way, inform us of how things are. The book takes a different approach to the much more in-your-face articles of the journalist character, Helen Pratt, who gets the publication she is working for closed down, before she swans off to continue her hard-hitting journalism in America.
I have read that Christopher Isherwood ended up losing faith in Mr Norris Changes Trains, which is a shame. I thought it a great book – engaging and fun, as though P.G. Wodehouse decided to indulge his darker side. Norris makes me think of a Bertie Wooster figure, presented here in later life as a kind of con artist making a feckless living using his smart contacts, while Jeeves metamorphoses into Schmidt, a self-serving thug who intimidates his master. And yet the book is also serious and relevant, both to the times in which it was written, and to any situation where people believe in simple solutions to complex problems
