A Single Man

You might start to think I throw this phrase around coz I use it quite often, but there really are very few books I can manage to read in a day. Case in point, it took me about 5 months to read V. by Thomas Pynchon. This book it took maybe two days maximum to get through it, and the only reason I didn’t manage to finish it in less was because I was at a conference around the time I was reading it.

I’d heard of Isherwood through an old classmate of mine from University, who told me about how he was quite good with writing about the experience of gay men. I ended up hearing about him again during my Creative Writing classes, when we used an extract from The Berlin Stories (I believe it was that) to talk about examples on how to describe characters without focusing simply on their looks. I’ve bought a few books since I first heard about him, and this was the first one I read.

You may have heard of the movie starring Colin Firth that came out in the 2000s.

I personally haven’t watched it, opting instead to read the book; not out of snobbery, but because I can’t seem to sit and watch a movie with patience anymore unless I’m watching it with a friend. The book was actually quite a satisfying read, but I do have to put a spoiler alert just in case.

George is a professor of English literature in Los Angeles, an unassuming man with an unassuming life. He has a lovely little house in a community that lives in a pretty nice part of LA, his neighbours are nosey and rather judgmental but nice to him to his face, and he is dealing with the pain of being alone after the death of his partner, Jim. It’s never really explored exactly how Jim died, but there are hints throughout the book that he died of some kind of illness. He hasn’t really spoken about Jim’s death to anyone but his closest friend (his neighbours, surely, have no idea), and he is going about his life and existence drearily and waiting for it all to be over.

While not explicitly stated, it’s very clear that George loved Jim immensely, and that the pain of his partner’s death has affected him so deeply that he’s lost all will to live. He floats through his life and the motions without really giving meaning to anything, trying to focus on his day but instead finding everything he does a way of mourning his lover.

What I liked about this book is that the time frame isn’t thrown at you so forcefully. In other novels, when the story takes place in a day or twenty-four hours, the fact is ingrained into you from the beginning of the story. This novel takes place in one day, during George’s average work day and what happens after it, but you don’t realize this until the story has progressed quite a bit. (An alternate title could have been A Single Day, I guess.)

This novel does a wonderful job of exploring George’s life without Jim and how he processes it – the loss, the loneliness, the feeling that nobody will ever understand their relationship, and the (renewed) feeling of finding joy in day-to-day activities such as lecturing or walking through campus or grabbing a drink with someone who you have a slight fancy for. The characters are very well thought out, and even though we experience them through George who might not know enough about them to make them seem like great characters, you still get enough through Isherwood’s writing to know more about these characters than they let on through their speech or George’s descriptions.

All in all I give this book a 4/5. Anyone looking for something that’s written poetically but is prose, or maybe something that carries a wonderful story with it without having too much grandeur about it should definitely read this book.

I don’t really have the right words to describe how beautiful this book is. It remains my favorite book to date. Christopher Isherwood, more so than usual, writes in a simple but poetic way in this book which hooks you immediately! Read it and then watch the movie.