The Memorial

Portrait of a Family

With The Memorial, Christopher Isherwood began his lifelong work of rewriting his own experiences into witty yet almost forensic portraits of modern society. Set in the aftermath of World War I, The Memorial portrays the dissolution of a tradition-bound English family. Cambridge student Eric Vernon finds himself torn between his desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice before dying in the war, and his envy for his father's great friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin and the pursuit of meaningless relationships.

Published in 1932, when Isherwood was twenty-eight years old, The Memorial is the immediate precursor to the first volume of the famous Berlin Stories, but it stand in its own right as the first book in which Isherwood really found his literary voice.