Mr Norris Changes Trains
by Christopher Isherwood
Summary
William Bradshaw, an Englishman teaching in Berlin, meets Arthur Norris on a train crossing into Germany, an ill fitting wigged gentleman traveling on a passport that plainly worries him. Bradshaw is drawn into Norris's chaotic life in a city where the Nazi party is filling the streets: Norris turns out to be simultaneously a communist sympathizer, a man with private masochistic tastes, and, it becomes clear, an informant secretly selling information to the French. When Norris's own assistant tries to blackmail him, he uses Bradshaw as an unwitting decoy to meet an aristocrat he is conning, and Bradshaw's communist friend Ludwig Bayer eventually warns him outright that both the Gestapo and the party already know what Norris is. After the Reichstag fire scatters what remains of Bradshaw's Berlin circle, he persuades Norris to flee the country. The novel ends with Norris's postcards arriving from exile in Rio de Janeiro, still bewildered, still asking what he has done to deserve any of it.
Isherwood narrates in a flat, deliberately passive voice that records the city's descent into fascism with almost no editorializing, letting Norris's comic vanity play out against a backdrop the reader already knows is about to turn lethal. It reads quickly and lightly on its surface, funny scene by scene, and that lightness is exactly what makes the political dread underneath it land as hard as it does; Isherwood himself later called his own narrator heartless, uneasy with how little the book seems to feel for the Berliners actually living through what he only visited.
Isherwood based Norris closely on Gerald Hamilton, a real conman and fellow expatriate he knew in Berlin, and Bradshaw carried Isherwood's own middle names, a stand in he replaced with his real name only in the later Berlin novel that followed. Together with that companion book, Goodbye to Berlin, this novel supplied the source material for the 1966 musical Cabaret and its 1972 film version.
Historical Context & Significance
Hogarth Press published the novel in Britain in 1935; an American publisher retitled it The Last of Mr Norris, reportedly convinced that American readers would not understand what changing trains meant. No literary prize is recorded as having considered it, and neither this novel nor Goodbye to Berlin, the companion book that followed it in 1939, won one. New Directions gathered the two as The Berlin Stories in 1945, the form in which most American readers have met them since.
The novel found lasting attention less through prizes than through what it became: the two Berlin books together shaped John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera, which in turn became the 1966 stage musical Cabaret and Bob Fosse's 1972 film, keeping Isherwood's Weimar Berlin in front of audiences who had never read either original novel.