The Sound of Trumpets - Softcover

Mortimer, John Clifford

3.57

229 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140288511 ISBN 13: 9780140288513

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

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American readers will find much to recognize in this wicked satire of modern politics and morality wars. Laying low since he and his beloved Maggie Thatcher were removed from office, Leslie Titmuss has been waiting for an opportunity to return from his political grave and exact his revenge on the Tories who betrayed him. His chance comes with the arrival of New Labour hopeful Terry Flitton, a principled, centrist politician whose thirst for power is matched only by his political naivete. Who better to school him in the arts of political maneuvering than a seasoned veteran with an ax to grind? Before long Flitton and Lord Titmuss are celebrating success -- but at a price that leaves the young politician searching for the values he lost along the way.

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Review:

In Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained John Mortimer took some fairly hefty swipes at the Thatcherite Conservative governments and the way the Labour Party had let them get away with it. The fact that Labour is the government at this writing appears to have changed nothing and the final part of this post-war political trilogy launches a pretty good swipe at them as well. New Labour--or "conservatism with water" as the trilogy's most enduring character, Leslie Titmuss, calls them--are seen, like the appearance of identical high streets in every town, as just another example of the blanding of Britain. So enter Titmuss--now retired from the Thatcher cabinet and called Lord Titmuss, First Baron Skurfield--to shake things up. He plays a wonderful Mephistopheles to a proto-Blairite parliamentary candidate's Faust as the electors in the tranquil Rapstone Valley again become a microcosm of British public life. Champagne socialists seem to come out of it all rather well, (as, it must be said, do reactionary old brutes like Titmuss) and the real venom is again reserved for the insipid political clones and power junkies. All in all vintage Mortimer. --Nick Wroe

About the Author:

John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist, and former practicing barrister who has written many film scripts as well as stage, radio, and television plays, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He is the author of twelve collections of Rumpole stories and three acclaimed volumes of autobiography.

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