Bremen, 1928. The Greek Islands, 1932. London, 1938. California, 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators all named Christopher Isherwood. Here are the postcards home from a spiritual tourist looking for a new mode of life as well as a new place to live while Europe, and then the world, moves relentlessly toward war. Which of the guides he encounters can lead him to a better future? The businessman, the utopian, the guru, the geisha?
Published in 1962,
Down There on a Visit
is based on material from a proposed epic that would also have incorporated
The Berlin Stories.
It is now widely regarded as the most accomplished of Isherwood's novels.