[Christopher Isherwood] is the best British novelist of his generation…. [His] fictions have achieved the integrity of art while illuminating the human tensions of our time. Muted in tone, self-effacing in manner, his works continue to make a quiet but persistent claim on our attention….

To read … his "autobiographical" Lions and Shadows, is to find oneself not only committed to the reading of all his other books but surprised into an appreciation of the rarest literary conjunction of our times: readability and high intelligence…. Readability is usually allied with superficiality, best-sellerdom, or, at best, competent nonfiction, and there can be little doubt that Isherwood's readability has preserved him from academic sanctification. It is difficult to be properly serious about a writer in whose literary presence one feels so relaxed. (p. 3)

Certainly the effect of ease in Isherwood's writing is deluding: it persuades the reader to overlook the enormous skill of his prose….

No one, in these works, is romanticized, condemned, or even judged; if the narrator, named Christopher Isherwood, responds at all, he does so only from personal pique or inconvenience. The brilliantly unobtrusive prose allows us to watch violence, brutality, and compromise with pain, and to realize only when the book is finished that in doing so we, like the narrator, have failed in humanity. Isherwood's Berlin Stories are the best rendering of early Hitler Germany we have: an artistic re-creation of a society's self-betrayal. (p. 4)

In a consideration of Isherwood's major work, a division clearly suggests itself: Documentaries and Novels. I call "documentaries" those works in which "Christopher Isherwood," the ventriloquist's dummy, appears; "novels," those works in which he does not…. The division is less arbitrary, or superficial, than may at first appear. If, for example, we call the books with the "Christopher Isherwood" narrator "political," we begin to see that it is precisely in the use of this particular device of point of view that Isherwood's success as a political novelist lies. Even his so-called factual books, Lions and Shadows, Journey to a War, The Condor and the Cows, are documentaries in their presentation of events, in their selection of incident, and in the character of the dummy who tells the story. In all of these, emotion has been transposed or dissolved, and the distance which political novels require has been achieved. (p. 15)

Be that as it may, a comparison of Isherwood's portrayals of characters in his documentaries, and his "factual" portraits of actual people, reveals immediately the particular and peculiar art of the documentary. His factual portraits of Ernst Toller, Virginia Woolf, and Klaus Mann…, and his sketch of Aldous Huxley …, are lifeless and unevocative. Without the dummy, without the touch of the artist, Isherwood is strangely feeble. The reporter without the artist is only a competent journalist. (p. 17)

The rare gift of touching a portrait with life is discovered by Isherwood only in the documentaries; the lifelessness of his actual portraits attests to this. (p. 18)

The whole question of point of view and the reliability of the narrator has been seen as central in modern studies of the novel. It is the more extraordinary … that critics have failed to recognize that Isherwood alone developed the form of the documentary and the particular narrator who makes it possible. Not even Wayne Booth, whose Rhetoric of Fiction is devoted to the relationship between the chosen point of narration and the sense of truth and morality conveyed by the story, has seen how Isherwood's first-person dummy makes possible a kind of veracity that is freed from an intrusive sense of morality or ideological bias. Yet a study of Isherwood's fictional technique makes clear the apparent anomaly that political novels are best narrated by a first-person viewer of bland personality, while interior novels of sensibility are, as Henry James of course discovered, impossible successfully to render in the first person. Furthermore, the bland first-person narrator saves the political novel from too strident a presentation of ideology so that, in the end, the moral point of view for which Wayne Booth hankers, is, in fact, created. (p. 19)

"Christopher Isherwood," who refuses to judge the characters, who, indeed, allows himself to be charmed by them, provides the perfect unity: the focused, the unjudging camera, which visualizes but does not preach. Isherwood is fond of referring to some of his works as dynamic portraits; it is in the dynamic portraits, with the dummy as the focal point, that Isherwood … gains for himself the obviously essential aesthetic distance. Distance, of time as well as of narrator, is essential to Isherwood … (p. 21)

"Christopher Isherwood," throughout Lions and Shadows, is seen as immature, passive, always admiring some stronger, more forceful or attractive figure. In fact,… Isherwood was a markedly active and dominating figure among his friends…. The dummy has been formed to serve its particular purpose in this masterful book in the documentary form. (p. 23)

Prater Violet is a brilliant novella which re-creates the whole lunatic process involved in the making of a successful film. Isherwood, in fact, had been working on the writing of films for many years prior to 1945, but "Christopher Isherwood" of the story assumes no expertise as he trails after the director in England during the early thirties. Indeed, the dummy is depicted here rather more harshly than before, complete with mother and brother who are amiable and long-suffering in the presence of arrogant, German-speaking Chris. (p. 26)

Down There on a Visit, particularly in its two best sections, "Waldemar" and "Paul," is a brilliant example of how suffering (or, as we say, life) can be transmuted into art…. It is the extent and subtlety of the transformation that intrigues us. Isherwood has managed, astonishingly, to keep separate "the man who suffers and the mind which creates." (pp. 31-2)

Yet one cannot go on to discuss the "novels," as opposed to the documentaries, without pointing to the extraordinary accomplishment of this last of the documentaries. The four sections of Down There on a Visit, although uneven, do precisely and uniquely reveal the four versions of hell which modern man has most consistently chosen to explore…. The dummy "Christopher Isherwood" has visited every hell except that of complacency. Immensely readable, as always, one of the most fascinating and accurate record of several eras, Down There on a Visit is perhaps the best of Isherwood's documentaries, because it took the most courage to write. It is clearly the best work of fiction we have on the spiritual odyssey of his generation. (pp. 32-3)

What is remarkable about [All the Conspirators] is its accomplished technique, style, and tone: Isherwood might not have discovered his true voice, but he was clearly a born writer, and his novel is still in print. Cyril Connolly … called it mature, readable, concentrated, and perceptive; it was all of these despite its author's early age, and, despite Isherwood's youthful fascination with private worlds, it is an available book, not only to another generation of "angry young men," but also to readers the same age as the novel itself, or older. (pp. 33-4)

[The Memorial] is divided into four sections, each superficially independent as though it were a family photograph…. The technique [used in this novel] has been compared, astonishingly, with Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a work Isherwood admits to never having read through. The comparison, however, is suggestive: if the two writers could not be more different in style, setting, tone, and theme, they are alike in evoking societies which have largely destroyed themselves…. Here, as in all of Isherwood's novels, the relation between the private life and the public event is closer, more vital than it was in the novels of the previous generation. Yet differing from the documentaries, the novels allow the private individuals greater development, a more richly perceived interior life, a deeper intelligence. (pp. 35-6)

It is Angus Wilson who points out that Isherwood, in The World in the Evening, explores for the first time "the complex patterns of emotional love" [see CLC, Vol. 11]. His readiness for this exploration perhaps persuaded him to return to the "novel" form; certainly his special achievement is to have created, in 1954, a novel in which the women characters are not, as in the novels of almost every other writer in the fifties …, objects of the hero's scorn, leers, lusts, and aggressions, twice as simple as the hero, and five times as evil. (p. 38)

The letters … [used in the novel] constitute the book's chief failure, which is one of over-all technique. Isherwood apparently wrote the letters from Elizabeth Rydal with fatal ease. Many of them are beautifully done…. But all the other letters, and particularly that written by Stephen at the end of the book to his wife-of-the-doll-house, are little more than admissions of defeat. The difficulty, of course, is to get inside a character (the dummy had only to look, listen, and, later, respond) without the use of diaries, letters, or first-person narration: to show inner struggles without requiring that the characters expound them personally. This use of letters more seriously weakens Isherwood's … A Meeting by the River; he has yet to master the rare technical skill of the novelist, to which James devoted his life, of being able to manifest in act, dialogue, and image the inner spiritual quality and growth of the characters. (pp. 38-9)

A Single Man (1964), that masterpiece of a comic novel, is the story of one day in the life of an expatriate English professor in Los Angeles. It contains the best American college classroom scene ever portrayed, and a series of stunning portraits, not least of all George, the central character who, like Leopold Bloom, is allowed no single moment of privacy, but who, unlike Bloom, is not surrounded by a wealth of literary symbols or endowed with a shred more dignity than he can muster up for himself….

Not that A Single Man ever mentions spiritual experience; that is its greatness. Here is only the portrait of an inhabited body and the attempts it makes at living. (p. 42)

A Meeting by the River (1967), is a failure, an attempt to use insufficiently digested material gathered on a visit to a monastery in India. Unable to find the proper narrative technique …, Isherwood falls back on letters which are unsuccessful on even the most superficial level: in an age of telephone calls and jet flights, it is simply improbable that the two brothers in the book would write, for the few days they are together, as compulsively as Clarissa Harlowe. (p. 44)

If his religion of Vedanta simply has not worked when incorporated wholesale into his novels (as in A Meeting by the River) it appears to have worked well enough in his life and therefore indirectly in his art. Certainly it is essential for anyone who would understand him to realize that his religious conversion has made him closer to, not more distant from, the problems of his time. (p. 46)