Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2584366 in Books
• Published on: 1988-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

From the Publisher
A lively, ironic portrayal of England in the 1920's.
With The Memorial, Christopher Isherwood began his lifelong work of rewriting his own experiences into witty yet almost forensic portraits of modern society. Set in the aftermath of World War I, The Memorial portrays the dissolution of a tradition-bound English family. Cambridge student Eric Vernon finds himself torn between his desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice before dying in the war, and his envy for his father’s great friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin and the pursuit of meaningless relationships.

"Only now that Isherwood is dead can the pattern be seen clearly in a life that ranged restlessly from Oxbridge skeptic to Hindu disciple, from literary collaborator with W. H. Auden to Boswell of prewar Britain and postwar Hollywood. . . . His novels and nonfiction now all seem to be chapters of one enormous work in which he is the major character." The Guardian

"A genuine interpretation of the times." Frank Kermode

Customer Reviews

Fascinating insight to inter-war period society and decline
I'd never heard of Christopher Isherwood, this book was recommended to me..It's a story about a group of people and their lives in the aftermath of World War one. There really is no central character. The story is a bit confusing in that the author gives us various scenes with the characters in part one, before introducing them in part two, which is set eight years previously. And throughout the book, we are given fleeting glimpses of these people, and various flashbacks to even earlier periods before the war.
Ultimately, this book is about the landed gentry and their decline during the inter-war period, their fears and resentment of the working class and the rise of socialism and as such, it is a brilliant book. Because it doesn't beat the message in: it skims over it. It is like a film that only gives fleeting glimpses, and lets you draw your own conclusions. It is only towards the end that the homosexuality of it's main character (if it has a main character) become apparent, and this is handled in the narrative in an excellent way: glossed over, worked around, barely alluded to, never directly acknowledged; just as in reality.
And most importantly, there is no obvious conclusion to this book. It's a series of incidents with various people of the same class, but of different 'schools' and generations. We see them in situations several years apart, and then it's just left at that, there's no obvious ending, except what we make for ourselves.
Overall, this book is a terrific insight to a particular generation and time in history, which can only be told by someone who lived through it and saw it.