Mr Norris Changes Trains

Title: Mr Norris Changes Trains
Author: Christopher Isherwood
Published: 1935, this edition 1999 from Vintage
Genre: Historical fiction
Pages: 230


I am so sorry, Mr Isherwood. I started Mr Norris sometime in... March? And then Älä koskaan pyyhi kyyneleitä paljain käsin happened. And Varistyttö and its sequels. And Mr Millar's new book, the Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies. And a couple of Pratchetts. So, since I owned Mr Norris, all the library books kinda came first.  But when I picked it back up, and had more than five minutes to really sink into it, the pages just flew.

It's the 1930's, and William Bradshaw is traveling to Berlin, to teach English to the locals. On the train he meets a very nervous, small man called Arthur Norris, who's like that one slightly greasy uncle everyone has. They strike a friendship, two Englishmen in Germany, and we the readers, with William, spend the rest of the book wondering what bumbling Mr Norris and his shady deals are really about. Not to mention that shady secretary.

The Nazis are on the streets already, communists as well, politics all over the place, the war looming, but no one yet knows just how bad it is going to get. It's the calm before the storm, and Mr Isherwood writes it beautifully.


   Arthur's hand was straying abstractedly over Anni's thigh. She raised herself and smacked it sharply, with the impersonal viciousness of a cat.
   'Oh, dear, I'm afraid you're in a very cruel mood this evening! I see I shall be corrected for this. Anni is an exceedingly severe young lady!' Arthur sniggered loudly: continued conversationally in English: 'Do you think it's an exquisitely beautiful face? Like a Raphael Madonna. The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh.'
   'I think it's very good indeed.'