Plot
The novel follows the movements of William Bradshaw, its narrator, who meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris on a train going from Holland to Germany. As they approach the frontier William strikes up a conversation with Mr Norris, who wears an ill-fitting wig and carries a suspect passport.
William and Mr Norris succeed in crossing the frontier. Afterward, Mr Norris invites William to dinner and the two become friends. In Berlin they see each other frequently (including eating ham and eggs at the first class restaurant of Berlin Friedrichstraße railway station). Several oddities of Mr Norris's personal life are revealed, one of which is that he is a masochist. Another is that he is a Communist, which is dangerous in Hitler-era Germany. Other aspects of Mr Norris's personal life remain mysterious. He seems to run a business with an assistant Schmidt, who tyrannizes him. Norris gets into more and more straitened circumstances and has to leave Berlin.
Norris subsequently returns with his fortunes restored and apparently conducting communication with an unknown Frenchwoman called Margot. Schmidt reappears and tries to blackmail Norris. Norris uses Bradshaw as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend of his, Baron Pregnitz, to take a holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a Dutchman. Bradshaw is urgently recalled by Ludwig Bayer (based on Willi Münzenberg) one of the leaders of the Communist groups, who explains that Norris was spying for the French and both his group and the police know about it. Bradshaw observes they are being followed by the police and persuades Norris to leave Germany. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis eliminate Bayer and most of Norris's comrades. Bradshaw returns to England where he receives intermittent notes and postcards from Norris, who has fled Berlin, pursued by Schmidt. The novel's last words are drawn from a postcard that Mr Norris sends to William from Rio de Janeiro: "What have I done to deserve all this?"
Read more about this topic: Mr Norris Changes Trains
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)