Book Review: "The Memorial" by Christopher Isherwood

An early work of Christopher Isherwood, author of "Goodbye to Berlin" and "A Single Man" that is normally regarded as flawed and imperfect is "The Memorial". Honestly, I have to say that I do not know why people regard this work as flawed or a bit off - only really because it is not up to the Isherwood standard that we hold him to today.

This book is very simple to understand in its storyline. It's about a man who comes back from the war, his name is Eric and his father's friend is called Edward. Edward lives a full and free life after the war whereas Eric is more sheltered. Going along to befriend Edward, Eric is about to learn a very important lesson about life, war, love and women whilst he throws himself into the quickly modernising and massively changing life of one of the most beautiful cities of the latter 20th century - Berlin.

The language in this novel is, in my opinion, some of Isherwood's finest language on the human soul. He writes in a way which you can get perfectly lost it. You can follow characters like Lily as they natter away and really picture the conversation happening from the inside, and it is like you can see into the centre of each character to know whether what they're saying is really what they're feeling - or whether instead, they are hiding something.

Just take a look at this passage that Isherwood wrote in the beginnings of the book:

"Oh, it was cruelly unjust, it was fiendish that she should have so many sorrows to bear. She seemed to have lost everything that she'd valued in the world. And yet she could still be so sweet and gentle, without any bitterness. And he, he'd have gladly been flayed alive if that could have lightened all this sorrow for her by one particle. He grieved over her in secret. He dared say nothing, not one kind word even, for fear that she should be troubled or embarrassed by his interest..."

When we read Isherwood we therefore get these moments of characters wanting to say something that they think, but then end up keeping their thoughts to themselves out of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It makes for excellent drama and is something that I think is very promising in this book as a theme. This strange tension between thought and conversation makes for character development which lacks stability and trust.

“Yes he really is my idea of a saint, Anne thought, her eyes resting on Eric’s tall bony figure, there in the corner by her mother. You could have put him straight into the Bible just as he was, in his plain but obviously rather expensive dark suit, with his metal-rimmed glasses and the odd pauses in his speech, relics of his stammer. He wouldn’t be out of place. There was something ancient and sombre about him. And when he looked at you, you felt like he was absolutely honest and fearless and good. He had beautiful eyes.”

There is always something very dark and introspective about the books of Christopher Isherwood and as an early work, I think that via this passage we can tell that there was definitely a want there to convey the appearance of a character through the eyes of another character but keep the entire thing in third person. This is something you will see repeated in other Christopher Isherwood novels of the later times and the Berlin Novels as well.

So as a conclusion, I think I have aptly disproven the amount of theories that categorise this novel as one of his flawed early works and even though it may not be perfectly characterised as a Christopher Isherwood novel, I feel it is definitely one of his great novels in which he expresses himself with the vigour of the post-war situation and the modernisation theme. There is such liberation to this writing, but a calm tension brewing in the thoughts of the characters. Tell me that does not sound like the perfect Isherwood novel.