Poll
What work of fiction would you like to read in February?
Poll added by: Jennifer W
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Mr Norris Changes Trains wins the fiction poll for our February 2016 read...... Mr Norris Changes Trains 6 votes, 50.0%
Ann Veronica 3 votes, 25.0%
The Haunted Bookshop 2 votes, 16.7%
Riders of the Purple Sage 1 vote, 8.3%
Looking forward to it. I've got the book out of the library in readiness.
I have just finished reading...
"Mr Norris Changes Trains" by Christopher Isherwood
The first book I have read by Christopher Isherwood since my teens back in the 1970s and I was delighted to discover it was every bit as good as I had remembered. I now eagerly anticipate our fiction group read in February 2016. It’s a captivating novel about a duplicitous friendship and set against the backdrop of a country in turmoil.
Click here to read my review
4/5
Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the United States as The Last of Mr. Norris) is a 1933 novel by the British writer Christopher Isherwood. It is frequently included with Goodbye to Berlin, another Isherwood novel, in a single volume, The Berlin Stories. Inspiration for the novel was drawn from Isherwood's experiences as an expatriate living in Berlin during the early 1930s.
After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933, Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.
I am also going to nominate a related book for our non-fiction read, and that is Christopher and His Kind also by by Christopher Isherwood - I think it might make a brilliant companion read (see the non-fiction nomination thread for more information).
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Coincidentally the real life Norris, Gerald Hamilton, who also appears in the brilliant Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms: The Spyhunter, the Fashion Designer & the Man From Moscow which I highly recommend (see the thread in Hot Reads and my review) also has a book written about him - The Man Who Was Norris: The Life of Gerald Hamilton by Tom Cullen - a jaw-dropping account of a thoroughly unpleasant man, albeit one who might make a fun dinner guest. Gerald Hamilton went through life managing to amass a large number of distinguished and not-so-distinguished friends, despite being a liar, a thief, and completely two-faced. A man who was guaranteed in any political situation to choose the most repellent side, who fabricated almost every detail of his life, and would sell you down the river for the smallest amount of money. Somehow, despite being permanently bankrupt, he managed to live a life filled with five-star hotels, the finest wines, and the most luxurious of foods, whether in Weimar-era Berlin or London in the swinging sixties.