Mr Norris Changes Trains

After sitting on my bookshelf at work for a number of months, I finally decided to crack "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" open. Having already read "A Single Man," I was fairly well acquainted with Isherwood's prose and style. The hook in the beginning is a little fleeting and this is why I had put off reading MNCT for so long - because I found the first couple of pages hard to engage with. However, after getting past the introductory hump, I found this book hard to put down. MNCT gives a curious account and some insight into pre-WWII Berlin, the life of some British ex-pats living there, the German Communist Party and the Nazis. In line with Isherwood's other works, descriptions are light and airy rather than overdone to the point that they become meaningless, and they allow the story to continue easily. After doing some research on this book, I found out that Isherwood was largely ashamed by MNCT later in life because "he had lied about himself through the characterization of the narrator and that he did not truly understand the suffering of the people he had depicted." While the author's later disillusionment with his own work might have some basis in reality, I found MNCT to be enjoyable nonetheless. Excellent read, highly recommended.

The author tells a story from the beginning of the nineteen thirties and from a Berlin which has still not realized how dangerous the political situation is. The book is not political, but politics give never the less a background for the story. Social democrats, communists and nazis are still fighting, but ordinary people really don't care, at least not yet. But at the end of the story you understand what way things are going. A lot of different characters and their acting under these circumstances are described, objectively,completely without prejudice or other strong feelings. Altogether, the book gives a good impression of the atmosphere in Berlin before the great disaster.

I rate this book at medium level largely because I found it too slow moving. For me there was too much to and fro between the two main characters and not much progress in the story surrounding them. It was the sort of plot typical of a female writer. (No offence to the ladies intended). This is not surprising considering the demeanour of the famously homosexual Isherwood.The prose was excellent and the book was beautifully written. It was easy to read.The sadism scenes were not very realistic and seemed to be there just to spice things up. Nevertheless I am sure they were important to Isherwood himself. They gave just a hint of the naughty Berlin at that time.In all it was a rather sad story.

Isherwood is a writer of high calibre and this book sets the scene for pre Nazi Berlin and a country on the cusp. We all know what is coming but this book takes you into a world where they had hopes for different things and then from a high point of possible better futures the country descends as we know into totalitarianism and all that follows. It's like the moment before you see the sword will fall and you are blissfully unaware that you cannot stop it.

Direct and compelling - a not-so mysterious mystery about complex actors. A real sense of Berlin society in transformation, but even more so about human relationships. .

The story is not as good as the illustrations, excellent illustrations. There is a pro Nazi element I did not like in the story

An excellent piece of historical fiction. Set in Europe, mostly Germany, during the 1930s. In the novel Mr. Norris is a compatriot and a friend of Christopher Isherwood. He is a rather unscrupulous businessman who is one-step ahead of his creditors and authorities. Thus, he's constantly "changing trains".

Isherwood is one of the best story tellers. HHe has always been under rated.

So far I've read the first novella in this collection, Mr Norris Changes Trains. After a chance encounter on a train, William Bradshaw befriends the charismatic but distinctly shifty Arthur Norris - who turns out to be a charming yet financially precarious businessman who never seems to want to discuss his shady dealings too much.This is an entertaining romp which vividly portrays the decadence and growing political tensions - and, as the story progresses, growing intolerance and persecution - in early 1930s Berlin. Norris himself is a complex and enigmatic character, but Isherwood had the gift of bringing even minor characters to life.In fact possibly the least interesting character is Bradshaw, from whose perspective the story is told but who exists mainly to be our eyes and ears in the colourful yet grimy - and increasingly dangerous - world around him, but is himself not terribly interesting. In that sense he reminds me a little of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby; and in fact Norris is, like Gatsby, the real heart of the story (albeit a far more, shall we say, morally doubtful character than Fitzgerald's creation).So it's all pretty enjoyable and very elegantly written. In some ways though it seemed almost a little too elegant - there are times when it felt like there should be a greater sense of jeopardy, what with all those Nazis around. But it's a good read and recommended.

Only recently started reading Christopher Isherwood's novels and am completely enthralled by his writing style. The stories are very much 'of their time', but Isherwood's words flow and immerse you into the 1930s era. Many of his works are more like diaries than plot driven stories, but the journey is very enjoyable even if the destination isn't very exciting. I read this book after 'Goodbye to Berlin' which I also highly recommend.

Christopher Isherwood, inextricably associated with W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender, represents a kind of educated, literary, urbane Englishness, but with interests outside provincial England. Left wing, fairly openly homosexual (when it was illegal) intellectual, finely crafted poets, playwrights and or novelists. And sometimes moving between more than one genre, and even collaborating as writers.Cambridge educated – though he never finished his degree, Isherwood was drawn to the decadent, artistically modern, politically volatile city of Berlin at the tail end of the twenties and early thirties.In this book, - and in his more well-known one, Goodbye to Berlin – mainly because it was later turned into the movie, Cabaret – he recounts his experiences in that city, as political instability intensified, and lines of allegiance became sharply drawn, and the Nazi party, initially regarded as a kind of loony fringe, not to be taken seriously, began its terrifying rise.Isherwood casts himself as William Bradshaw, a young man, eager for the experience of living in another country, earning his living by teaching English to private students. Bradshaw meets the eponymous Mr Norris, striking up a conversation with him as a way to pass time on a long train journey.“As he spoke he touched his left temple delicately with his finger-tips, coughed, and suddenly smiled. His smile had great charm. It disclosed the ugliest teeth I had ever seen. They were like broken rocks”Norris is another Englishman, middle-aged, dissolute, clearly a not-to-be trusted wheeler-dealer of some kind, but his distinctly eccentric physical persona, and a strangely appealing charm, despite the obvious dishonesty, amuse Bradshaw, and the two form an unlikely friendship. Norris’s fastidious oddness - the wearing of bizarre wigs and an obsessive attention to prinkings and powderings not usually found at that time openly engaged in by English men, certainly not in England, is typical of the Berlin experience – decadent, sophisticated and utterly unprovincial, which proved alluring about to those seeking a more colourful, even dangerous, European experience. Norris, it later transpires, has predilections for a kind of wholesome sexual deviancy – he is open about his relations with a dominatrix and her ‘minder’ a young man who is a member of the Communist Party. It fact Anni, the whore, AND her minder Otto, are regarded as friends by Norris.Political affiliations are centre stage everywhere. Isherwood, and Norris choose the Left, even though Norris is not necessarily, ever, quite what he seems, and may have fingers in many pies, as he also has some friends whose political allegiance seem to belong more naturally to the right.What is marvellous about Isherwood’s writing, a kind of story telling journalism, an exploration of what it was like to be in Berlin, is that although he is undoubtedly writing about a period which became very dark and very dreadful, the second of his Berlin books, particularly, this is the undercurrent, flowing underneath a brilliant, light-touch observation. A sense of frenetic life, liveliness, wit and urbanity drive the book along, there is certainly more than a touch of fiddling whilst Rome burns about the Weimar republic.Norris himself is a quite extraordinary creation, and, just as Bradshaw is Isherwood’s novelising himself, Norris has a real origin – a friend of Isherwood’s, Gerald Hamilton, also a writer, and once known as ‘the wickedest man in Europe’. 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!The reader quite falls, as Bradshaw does, under his dubious charm, and it is a strange experience to find oneself appreciating the strange moral ambiguity of someone who would undoubtedly sell his own grannie to the highest bidder, yet, somehow, even whilst grannie might even know that herself, he comes across as naughty, rather than vicious. Or, as Isherwood/Bradshaw puts it, so much more elegantly at the start of the novel:“My first impression was that the stranger’s eyes were of an unusually light blue. They met mine for several blank seconds, vacant, unmistakably scared. Startled and innocently naughty, they half reminded me of an incident I couldn’t quite place; something which had happened a long time ago, to do with the upper fourth classroom. They were the eyes of a schoolboy surprised in the act of breaking one of the rules. Not that I had caught him, apparently, at anything except his own thoughts; perhaps he imagined I could read them”

I have seen the plaque outside the room that Isherwood rented in Nollerndorf. I read Goodbye to Berlin when I was teenager. But, spending time in Berlin myself, I've started a project of reading about the city from the perspectives of famous Englishmen who have lived here. This review is of the first of Isherwood's two Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains. (I will read the second after I've spent time with Bowie in Berlin).I'd forgotten just what a good writer Isherwood is: the telling detail, the clear prose, the outsiders perspective. I romped through this story about an innocent abroad that allows himself to be charmed by a sinister businessman, closes his eyes, looks away or makes up stories to forgive the man who will eventually betray him. In many ways, Norris seemed to be the personification of thirties Berlin: a showy surface,a dark underbelly and how the most important lies are the ones you tell yourself. What makes this novel particularly evocative is that Isherwood conjures up both a sense of fascination for his characters and their city along plus the growing threat as the political background to the story emerges blinking into the foreground. For the reader, there is the delicious knowledge of what is about to happen to Berlin, Germany and the whole world. I was full of admiration that Isherwood had the foresight or luck to be in the right place at the time.

This novel begins with William Bradshaw, a young English tutor, meeting the slightly ridiculous Mr Arthur Norris on a train to Berlin. Mr Norris is nervous at having to present his passport, elusive about what he does and, with his rather obvious wig and odd habits, does not seem as though he is a character to take seriously at first. However, this chance meeting results in a firm friendship and, fairly soon, William is visiting his new friend frequently and becomes involved in his disreputable life and associates; including his bullying secretary Herr Schmidt.Mr Norris is a man who lives well, despite his soon obvious lifestyle of debts, despair and dodgy dealings. The novel is set in 1930’s Berlin and so it is impossible to ignore the political situation unfolding there. Mr Norris is keen to shine at the local Communist Party meetings, but these activities also lead to him being questioned by the authorities.I have never read Christopher Isherwood before, but I liked the way that the author allowed us to interpret events for ourselves. He trusted the reader to keep up and so it is enough to infer certain things, or show us glimpses, so that we can make our own assumptions. The style of the novel seems deceptively slight, but this is a very clever book – beautifully written, it flows wonderfully and is filled with great characters and has an excellent setting.