There were two things that made me want to read this book. First, I'd enjoyed the film, and having read some Isherwood before, I decided that I would almost certainly love the book. Second, the only time I get to read every day is the 15 minutes I spend on the bus to work and back, so the length was appealing (such was my ultimate enjoyment of it that I read it in 6 days in blocks of 15 minutes - so about an hour and a half in total). Those are two rather shallow reasons for picking up a book, I think, but regardless - I loved this book. Perhaps even more than I was expecting to.

The touches of humour throughout, despite the sad premise, were deft and effective. Having seen the film first, I was surprised to see how much more personality George has in the book - in the film, we really only see him through the window of his own grief for the death of his partner, Jim, but the book offers us a much deeper insight into who George really is. He's catty, witty, bitter and cynical, and his mourning is only a very small part of his psyche.

For much of the book, we see him go about his day much as any other lonely citizen would. He drives to work and ruminates about killing all the people he despises. He watches two men playing tennis and fantasises about them later. He goes to the gym, visits friends and talks to his students. However, all of this is done beneath the veil of a deep, heart-wrenching loss, and the subtlety with which this sense of loss ebbs and flows throughout the narrative is incredibly poignant. He isn't always thinking about Jim, but he's never not thinking about him. Jim is always there, but he's not often entirely so. He ghosts through George's consciousness when George can bear to bring him to mind, but even when he can't, we still feel his presence in the empty house they once shared.

Other elements of the book that impressed me were the dimensions of the supporting characters. For example, the character of Charley in the film is shallow, vain and narcissistic, and clings desperately to the hope that George will one day come to his senses and fall in love with her. The Charley of the book is much more sympathetic - yes, she's still vain and slightly clueless, but underneath it all is a genuine platonic love for George, and a very real understanding of his relationship with Jim. Not once does she seem, as she does in the film, to believe that George settled for Jim for want of a woman to love. It's an important attribute to her character, making her friendship with George more real and understanding, and having rewatched the film since reading the book, it's disappointing that she was turned into a less sympathetic person for reasons of dramatic tension.

There are, of course, some parts of the book that haven't aged quite as well as others. Grief, loneliness and mortality may be timeless, but racial attitudes certainly aren't. Isherwood (and, by extension, George) may have been rather liberal and forward-thinking for their time, but reading parts of this book in public made me check who was behind me on the bus, feeling a little embarrassed - George quite often extols the virtues of 'Negroes' as being exotic and exciting, and talks about how pleased he is that America is becoming multicultural (he seems to find Asian people beautiful to the point of fetishisation) - but it's clear that he sees this idea of a mixed society as something bohemian and rebellious, and not quite as being necessary or equal. For the time in which the book was published, this was probably a very controversial viewpoint, and it still is - just not quite for the same reasons.

It's a beautiful book. It really is. The themes of isolation and loss are dealt with incredibly sensitively, with simple but poetic language and a cast of very realistic characters. The dialogue is so authentic that I couldn't quite believe it to be anything other than a transcript of real speech. The plot is thin, but the narrative is rich with meaning and ruminations. I can't recommend it highly enough - just be aware that, despite the subject matter being rather controversial for its contemporaries, some parts of it are very 'of its time'