Customer Reviews

Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life

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Not all of this is to my taste, but Mortimer is a wonderful comic writer with a really supreme sense of the foibles of human life and character. He takes nothing too seriously and certainly not himself and in these short chapters, thirty- two on all on various aspects of his life with the law, his family, he entertains and provides us perhaps one basic lesson: i.e.
If one has to go through it it's best to go through it with a smile. And if one has to go out, and one does have to go out, it's best to do it in laughter.

I should first confess my bias--I have often been tickled and sometimes awed by Mortimer's way with English prose for 20 years. So, in picking up this book I had the high expectations one might have before meeting an old friend or beloved teacher. No disappointment. Even if some of these essays are slightly less effervescent than others, all are at least wonderful, and several are both brilliant and touching.

Mortimer has given us a collection of short essays, conversational and often wryly funny, which he intends as a kind of spiritual bequeathal to his family and other heirs. The chapters range across a broad range of subjects, some perhaps outwardly frivolous, like the cooking of eggs. But in the main, Mortimer touches on matters of great substance--the nature of beauty, how to be happy, surprising ways in which our world has managed to be unjust, places and times for sex, how to dine sociably, the love of children, faith and reason, the terrors of the writer facing blank paper, and many more. I found these essays to be wise and absolutely delicious. I suspect that readers who have enjoyed Rumpole, or Mortimer's other biographical essays like Summer of a Doormouse, or Clinging to the Wreckage, will be quite pleased with these sketches.

Mortimer may, sadly, be nearing the end of his life, but at present he seems to be on a literary tear. I, for one, wish him many more prolific years.

Sir John Mortimer is an extremely literate and honestly open-minded person who writes with a flowing exquisiteness of the English language. This small book of his thoughts on a good life is a reminiscence of the life he has led and is still leading. He mentions a lot of classical literary authors and their characters that would further enrich a person's knowledge. Also, the various types of people he met working at the Old Bailey has surely enhanced his art of observing and putting their perspectives onto paper. Together with wild imaginations of his, no wonder his many writings are keenly absorbed by the public. The last ten chapters are my favorite but in each I find something to laugh out loud about. This is his own story and the way he tells it is invigorating. In not so many words in each section, he still succeeds in relaying his message that is predominantly deliberate.

Octogenarian John "Horace Rumpole" Mortimer provides a series of intelligent humorous essays and soliloquies on living life to the fullest especially the young, which the author insists has no age barrier but instead is a state of mind (and body - though outdoor sex at 81 or even 54 sounds vulgar to voyeurs not the players). The chapters are brief and to the point, as Mr. Mortimer provides his readers with his last will and testament of sorts that uses literary references to emphasize his philosophy of enjoying yourself. He has written these thirty-two essays on a myriad of topics that range the gamut of modern stifling not living. Speak up rather than echoing silence as Mr. Mortimer employs amusing word play, puns, and other uplifting humor to provide sound advice filled with fury to the young to live life for you rather than become someone else's tale signifying nothing.

Harriet Klausner

Mortimer writes Rumpole, who is a delight. This is the third (I think) in Mortimer's memoirs, and I missed its predecessors so this review may do Mr. Mortimer a disservice. There is a big of bragging, some interesting notes, but it a fairly forgettable series of life lessons, barely disguised as things of leave behind one that do not fit in a Will. It is a sad truth that there are a number of writers whose characters are more interesting, and charming, than their authors.

This book starts out: "All advice is perfectly useless. Particularly advice on the subject of life. You may, at a pinch, take your schoolteacher's word on the subject of equilateral triangles, or the Latin word for 'parsley'; but remember that life's a closed book to schoolteachers." That pretty much sets the tone for the book.

Sir Mortimer has been an actor, a barrister, librettist, screenwriter and playwright. Best known as the author of Rumpole of the Bailey, he is now 81 and passing along just a bit of the wisdom that he has learned through the ages.

These 32 short chapters discourse on history, poetry, education, democracy, smoking -- just about anything that enters his mind. And his mind thinks on very diverse subjects. It's not politically correct, at 81, he doesn't have to be. Profound though it is, if you can stop laughing enough.

Delightful book.

These are the random musings of an old man contemplating his mortality. After a writing career in which he had twenty novels published, in addition to fourteen stories featuring the fictional barrister, Horace Rumpole, and twelve plays as listed in this small book of ramblings about his life, I learned that he was actually a barrister himself at the Old Bailey. He was born five years after the end of the 1914-18 war, he says, and enjoyed and endured a 'public school' education where one of his school mates was Lord Byron. He calls Byron's DON JUAN one of the great masterpieces of European literature.

Sir John Mortimer (knighted in 1998) led a privileged life from the very beginning. Now, at age 81, he looks round at his children and grandchildren whose ages range from 53 to twelve, he contemplates: "Their words will echo out into the future, with their children and their children's children." What to leave them as his paternal legacy? That is what he ponders as he tells about life as it was for him at the various stages.

He wonders what to pass on to the next generation. So, he gives some ancient history concerning the birthplace of out civilization, in olden times called Mesopotamia in the Persian Empire. He talks about the times he spent enjoying one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Hanging Gardens. Then he goes on to tell about the city of peace (back then) in the time of Charlemagne, in the Ottoman Empire. "When Turkey was defeated in the 1914-18 war, the Allies carved up its possessions with quite arbitrary boundaries and placed an arbitrary king, Feisal, on the throne of Iraq. These kings ruled until a revolution led by the Baath party finally produced Saddam Hussein who was, of course, backed by America. Algebra was invented there at the center of civilization which conquered the whole of Spain."

His opinions on lots of things included this remark about democracy: "I suppose democracy was most nearly achieved in ancient Greece, when everyone except women and slaves took part in the government. The result was usually disastrous and led to the death of Socrates just as the introduction of democracy in England was started." Utopia, information technology as the cause of deterioration and decline of the English language "at least as its's spoken by the governing classes", family values and vulgarity, telling lies (the bigger, the better), Shakespeare, and old movies are just some of the topics he knows so much about. This is his postscript (P.S.) to his autobiographies, as he reflects on his good and prosperous life.

I am afraid I was quite disappointed in this book. The review in the Times that I had read made it sound like a much more profound and important book - one I would like to own rather than just take out of the library. I had previously enjoyed other books by John Mortimer, but this book was just a collection of random musings which did not hold together at all.

To my mind, John Mortimer's small book providing his reflections on life is an uneven effort. Sophomoric humor on trifles is often interposed with the more message driven treatment of serious subjects. His thinking on current international political events is from the perspective of a man faintly annoyed that the USSR of Michael Gorbachev did not last. While his thoughts on the good life are at times at odds with my thoughts, this is Mr. Mortimer's gift to the next generation not mine.