Customer Reviews

The Sound of Trumpets

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I loved Paradise Postponed. Even the name Leslie Titmuss makes me smile. Leslie reappears here, but the attention focuses on a wimpy candidate whom it's hard to root for. All seemed a bit tired, even the humor.

If there is one bipartisan voice in the darkly comic The Sound of Trumpets, it is that of the author, John Mortimer. With ripostes at the ready, his barbs are egalitarian as he mercilessly skewers both Labourites and Tories in this highly entertaining take on English political life.

Following Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained, the first two volumes in Mr. Mortimer's Rapstone Chronicles, The Sound Of Trumpets showcases the author at the peak of his acerbic wit, and reintroduces readers to Leslie Titmuss, MP, now a bitter, self-absorbed retiree who has little interest in his son or grandchildren, "whose names eluded him but to whom he sent modest cheques at Christmas with strict instructions that the money should be invested and not spent on computer games, C.D.s, rollerblades or any such unprofitable trifles."

What Lord Titmuss does have is an appetite for revenge upon those he considers traitorous and a gift for Machiavellian plotting.

When the local Tory MP meets an untimely and unseemly end (floating face down with a ping-pong ball in his mouth), young, ambitious Labourite Terry Flitton is nominated to stand for the now vacant seat representing the long Tory held districts of Hartscombe and Worsfield South.

A former employee of S.C.R.A.P. (The Society for Rural and Arboreal Protection), Terry is married to beautiful Kate, who is as devoted to saving the world as she is to vegetarianism. Terry is both charismatic and foolhardy. Upon meeting Agnes, the attractive fifty-year-old proprietress of a Socialist pamphlet strewn bookstore, he begins an affair with her.

Agnes sees Terry as one who will work for a Utopian world; Lord Titmuss sees him as a puppet to be manipulated.

Seeking retribution for supposed sins by his fellow conservatives, Lord Titmuss secretly masterminds the young Labour candidate's campaign. It is an uphill battle as the zealous hopeful becomes caught up in a B-list fox hunt, although he is pro animal rights; inadvertently appears soft on criminal offenders during a radio interview; and is found en deshabille with Agnes.

As a last resort, in a scene that hilariously punctures the pompous, Lord Titmuss the man who has been "the heart and soul of the Conservative Party" blends the wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the skewed logic that it is time for his party to lose as he delivers a public endorsement of Terry Flitton.

The crowd is stunned: "If Lord Titmuss had stripped and done a full frontal dance on the town hall steps they would not have been so astounded or, indeed, embarrassed." Nonetheless, they are obedient and Flitton wins the election handily.

However, the devilish Lord Titmuss does not rest. He mapped the young politicos heady rise; now he engineers a precipitous fall.

Mr. Mortimer's portraits of English eccentrics are unparalleled from Lord Titmuss's housekeeper, the fussbudget Mrs. Ragg who "either mothered him or, in moments of wild embarrassment, tried to flirt with him" to the acolytes surrounding Terry. They have their list of undesirable activities: "Selling alcoholic lemonade, catapults, war-like toys and bows and arrows of a certain size would be dealt with by imprisonment, as would holding raves, hang-gliding and disseminating books containing racially biased stories to persons of a tender age."

There is both pungency and pathos in the author's satire. The Sound Of Trumpets may be the final volume in this trilogy, but with John Mortimer one always hopes for more.

- Gail Cooke