The World in the Evening (1954) By Christopher Isherwood

I am somewhat at a loss to describe The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood.   The word “vast” comes to mind, though that seems vague and somewhat misleading.  By “vast” I don’t mean lengthy or inaccessible, or even epic, it is none of these.  I mean it is vast in the range of life experiences that are explored.

The book follows the early adult life of Stephen Monk, from his postgraduate days through two early marriages.  To tell his story Isherwood merges two established literary genres: the Masterpiece Theater formula of the British gentry aimlessly wandering through Europe, and the formula of American youth “finding themselves” on "the" continent, after graduation, before returning to the States to begin their adult lives.

The first marriage is to a British author named Elizabeth, who dies of a heart ailment -- the title is taken from one of her books.  His second marriage is to Jane, an American party girl. The book begins as Stephen’s marriage to Jane is dissolving, and is primarily told through a series of flashbacks triggered by his reading of Elizabeth’s personal letters as he is convalescing from a serious accident.  

Readers of this book will fall for Stephen as they page through his life story.  He is a likeable, almost charismatic figure, though he is not a particularly admirable human being, which perhaps adds to his attraction. 

While The World in the Evening is a personal story, it plays out mainly in Europe over a momentous period of history – World War II is underway by the book’s end.  This backdrop is rarely the focal point of the story, but its presence grows as the book unfolds.

Isherwood is regarded as an early witness of the rise of Nazism, and notes it frequently in his writings set in the 1930s, including this book.  Yet, what has always left me questioning is whether he recognized the early beginnings of this decline into an abyss as it was occurring, as his books suggest, or if it was with a flawless 20-20 hindsight.  His books were, to my knowledge, written years later, after the full extent of the holocaust became widely known to the rest of the world.  I may have to add an Isherwood biography to my reading list to better address this question (though that’s no guarantee of an answer), and let me point out that the question does not pertain solely to Isherwood.

And finally, this would not be an Isherwood novel were it not to include some gay characters.  One seems particularly worthy of mention because he seems out of context.  Stephen’s doctor has a young lover named Bob, who like Stephen was raised a Quaker.  From a literary standpoint, Bob’s primary purpose in the book is to allow Isherwood to explore the subject of religious pacifism at the advent of a war against an unmistakable evil. But the interesting thing about how Bob is portrayed is that he is philosophically an unapologetic gay man, who clearly would have become a “militant” gay activist if he lived in the 1970s or later, yet the story takes place in the 1930’s and was written in 1952 when this topic was still very much “the love that dare not speak its name.”