Paradise Postponed

This novel is quite a lark in the reading of it. The dialogue, for which Mortimer has an uncanny ear, sparkles with wit, and the characters all come across as both believably quotidian and quirky. Mortimer also manages to deftly sketch the changes in English society between the war years and 1985 into the background of all these intertwined goings-on. What fun! Oh yes, there's also the mystery of the will of Simeon Simcox, late pacifist, socialist vicar which bequeaths all to weaselly Conservative Cabinet MP Leslie Titmuss. The narrative is a bit rum on this point in that the said Simeon Simcox is actually alive throughout most of the novel as the story backtracks through time or rather hopscotches around it - more often than not from paragraph to paragraph, with no clear demarcation given - which takes a bit of getting used to, whilst also keeping the reader on his/her toes. A very lively, satisfactory read indeed, except that one is still left pondering why exactly the Bertrand Russell reading, seemingly atheistical Simcox became a vicar in the first place. Oh well, it's just as well to have something on which to chew after one turns the last pages. Mortimer is particularly deft in employing literary quotations to summarise entire sections of the book. The Kierkegaard quote summarising Part Three might well be employed to give the prospective reader an idea of the entire book's underlying theme and motif: "Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards."

I'm biased: I think John Mortimer's Rumpole stories are so perfectly written that I've never thought his longer works quite measure up. This one comes the closest; in Paradise Postponed, Mortimer follows a disparate group of characters from the Second World War up through the late 1960s, using their stories to reflect developments in England during the same period. As you might expect from the creator of Rumpole, there's also an interesting mystery, but the real focus is on the relationships and dynamics between the characters, as Mortimer centers on a young man from a working class background who eventually becomes a powerful politician. Mortimer has an uncanny knack for creating characters who are believable, quirky individuals, and he makes us care about their struggles. The dialogue crackles, which one might expect since Mortimer was writing the TV adaptation of Paradise Postponed at the same time he was writing the novel. Paradise Postponed has had two sequels, which don't have quite the same scope either in terms of character development or time period covered.What surprises me is that the TV adaptation of Paradise Postponed has never been released on video, at least in the U.S. There'd be a large market for it.