The events were more shocking than in previous sections, with people being attacked on the streets, or arrested for their anti-Nazi views. But as the book went on, the political situation in Berlin became more and more significant, the references to the Nazis and their actions became more and more explicit, and there was an undeniable sense of normality slipping away as Hitler's grasp on Germany tightened.īy the final section, the politics was no longer lurking beneath the surface as a subplot to the main narrative, but it was the main focus. The Nazi party did feature in the first section, but only as an aside, something that was mentioned frivolously and then moved away from fairly quickly. There's something quite magical about the formation of a piece of literature out of a failed plan, I think.īut there was something else about the structure that I thought was particularly striking and particularly clever: the six sections became progressively more political. I find this serendipity quite pleasing, in that this successful novel was born out of a plan for something else - these six segments were never meant to be presented in this format, and yet it works so fantastically well. I noted from the brief foreword that Isherwood originally intended this to be a much larger-scale novel, but these six chapters are the only fragments that remain from this plan. It was the highlights taken from a period of three years, and it hung together surprisingly well. Rather like a series of excerpts from a diary. We were following one character, in one place, living one life - it's just that there were some gaps of elapsed time between each new chapter. So while the novel was episodic in structure, it was by no means fragmented or truncated. Thirdly, multiple characters appeared in multiple sections. Secondly, the stories formed a linear and roughly continuous narrative.
This was down to a number of factors: firstly, the narrator and main character Christopher was the same in every part. But in spite of this, it didn't feel like a short story collection.
The book has six clear sections, each one functioning almost as a sketch or a short story in its own right. The characters were mad, mysterious, funny, frustrating - it was often their entertaining unusual-ness that made this book such a good read.īut the feature of this book that interested me even more than the characters was the structure. And I can't think of a more apt descriptor for them than eccentric. The book largely follows the main character Christopher Isherwood (yes, he has the same name as the author, but is apparently not supposed to represent him in particular) and his interactions with a variety of eccentric people in Berlin. I'm going to start by praising Isherwood's cast of characters, because I don't feel a review of this book would be complete without giving them a mention.
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