Dunster by John Mortimer ~ 1992. This edition: Penguin, 1993. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-015711-5. 344 pages.
My rating: 9/10
What a sound sort of writer John Mortimer is. Earnest and endlessly competent at presenting his points, but never preachy. Capable of conveying the deep humour of everyday situations, almost to the point of farce, but keeping things completely relatable – we recognize his characters and situations with deep inner glee. (Or occasionally mild embarrassment, if we suddenly see ourselves.)
I went through a Rumpole of the Bailey binge some years ago, and quite possibly overdid things a bit, as I’ve been happy to leave the numerous Rumpole books I had then acquired on the shelf in the “read again someday” section. But non-Rumpole John Mortimers have shown up twice in my reading stack this year, and I have deeply enjoyed them.
The first one was Character Parts, a 1986 book of collected “important people” interviews which the author undertook for the Sunday Times, in which John Mortimer-the-fiction-writer reveals himself to be a marvelous interviewer, effacing himself completely and allowing his subjects to hold forth, nudged now and again by Mortimer’s well-timed queries and leading comments. More on this collection in another post.
The book-of-this-moment is the thoughtfully satiric Dunster, and I mused, as I finished it up late last night, how serendipitously timed my reading was, on the very eve of November 11th, which is Remembrance Day here in Canada, the equivalent of the U.K.’s Armistice Day, and Veterans Day in the U.S.A.
For Dunster has, as a main plot point, an examination of the war experience, and its after-effects on the people who were thrown into its melee, who conducted themselves as best they could at the time, and who, decades later, are asked to examine their actions in light of current-day ethics and morals. John Mortimer wrote Dunster as a diverting bit of fiction, but the core of the book is thought-provokingly serious, and I came away as pensive as I was amused.
I greatly enjoyed this novel for its wry humour, and I appreciated its sardonically portrayed, deeply conflicted narrator, one Philip Progmire, accountant and secretly aspiring actor.
The surface story dips into the serious when it addresses the moral dilemmas people face in wartime, when otherwise good people are told to go out and do bad things, under the blanket societal permission of patriotism-in-wartime. Once the conflict is over, those actions come under the scrutiny of those who didn’t have that experience, and the application of peacetime ethics to wartime actions makes for uneasy consideration of how people can be so very variable when changing times demand it.
Philip Progmire’s lifelong shadow, Richard Dunster, is a fascinating character, and one whom I felt the author intended his readers to relate to, though Dunster’s role in the book is that of a continual moral irritant to mild-mannered Progmire, who just really wants to live a quiet life, trotting along each day to the comfortably salaried 9-to-5 job, coming home each night to wife and child, and indulging in amateur theatricals on weekends.
Dunster is that exceedingly rare thing, an utterly honest man, but as it turns out, honesty is as subject to degrees and shades as any other human trait, and may or may not be a comfortable thing to live with in daily life…
An extra personal-point-in-favour is the setting of the story, against the backdrop of the first Gulf War, in 1990-1991. It hasn’t been that long since that particular military exercise, a mere 25 years or so, and Mortimer has documented the mood of the time well enough to trigger a flood of personal memories. So much has happened since then, but it (“Desert Storm” – remember when that code name was in every newspaper headline?) was something of a starting point to the increasingly tense mood of current times, politically and militarily speaking.
From the back cover, an unavoidably simplified plot summary:
Outrageously outspoken and wildly unpredictable, Dick Dunster is the hero – or villain – in a drama of his own making. Philip Progmire is less heroic. He wants a quiet life with his wife Bethany and his job in the accounts department of the TV company Megapolis. But Dunster, his childhood friend and adversary, dogs his adult life, making him face cruel facts: his lack of acting talent, his wife’s infidelity and the possible involvement of his boss in one of the secret war crimes of the last World War.
Leaves & Pages 