The Sound of Trumpets by John Mortimer

In the final installment of the post-World War II trilogy that began with the best-selling Paradise Postponed, the merciless MP Leslie Titmuss has been deposed and replaced by Terry Flitton, a centrist-style politician familiar to both sides of the Atlantic. 40,000 first printing. Tour. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review John Mortimer is perhaps best known for his beloved books featuring Horace Rumpole, that irreverent barrister and great defender of muddled and sinful humanity. When he isn't skewering the British legal system, however, Mortimer keeps busy with the Rapstone Chronicles, set in the rough-and-tumble world of English politics. Titmuss Regained and Paradise Postponed followed the fortunes of cunning and avaricious Tory MP Leslie Titmuss as he rose to the heights of power under Margaret Thatcher, then was laid low when her government fell. At the beginning of this third novel in the series, the deposed Lord Titmuss has retired to his country home to lick his wounds and plot revenge against his own party, which he holds responsible for the Iron Lady's defeat. Then a local Conservative MP dies while performing autoerotic acrobatics in his swimming pool, and Titmuss seizes the main chance. He offers to secretly help the idealistic young Labour candidate, Terry Flitton, win the seat. The first indication that Flitton is treading dangerous ground comes during their initial meeting, when Titmuss suggests he deny his socialist leanings until after the election, and Terry protests, It wouldn't be true to my beliefs. Of course it would. His Lordship sighed and rose wearily to his feet as though about to explain an obvious point to a particularly thick House of Commons. You'd be doing your beliefs the greatest possible service. You'd be giving them the chance of a lifetime. Then, if you beat Wee Willie, and your party wins the next general election, you can come up red as roses. Be as bloody Socialist as you like! If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the path to power is simply littered with them. Before long the young idealist is compromising his ideals right and left and Titmuss is well on the way to achieving his revenge. Nobody has a better grasp of the absurdities and transgressions of British political life than John Mortimer, and The Sound of Trumpets is a delicious tour through the cutthroat world of electioneering told with scathing wit and a merciless eye. --Alix Wilber From Publishers Weekly Simply because England's political tides have turned from Tory Thatcherism to Blairite New Labour does not mean that Mortimer's Machiavellian Leslie Titmuss will be any less entertainingly scheming than in Paradise Postponed or Titmuss Regained. Although Titmuss has retired from Whitehall to write his dreaded tell-all memoirs, he takes a keen interest in Terry Flitton, Labour's candidate for the newly open parliamentary seat for the districts of Hartscombe and Worsfield South. Titmuss sees in Flitton an instrument of revenge against the party that betrayed his beloved Iron Lady, while Flitton, to his dismay, realizes that Titmuss possesses the killer political instincts that he lacks and needs. Mortimer, though a Labour voter, is a bipartisan satirist, skewering with equal enthusiasm both parties' rhetoric and campaign tactics. Flitton's farcical, accidental enlistment in the B-list local fox hunt not only provides a hilarious chase sequence, but also slyly dislodges conservative and contemporary mores. Flitton, however, should not be mistaken for a Blairite politician. It is precisely his old-fashioned ideals that are at odds with his success at the polls, his tenure in the new government and his downfall when Titmuss claims his Mephistophelian fee. At once lighthearted and cold-blooded, The Sound of Trumpets amusingly completes Mortimer's trilogy on modern Britain's rocky, convoluted political landscape. (Feb.) FYI: Viking will issue repackaged editions of Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained in January. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Paradise remains postponed in the third installment of Mortimer's scathing indictment of sociopolitical tomfoolery in contemporary Britain. The names and parties have changed, but the egos remain the same, as the Thatcher era gives way to the Labour revolution. Even in the face of shifting political sands, the indefatigable conservative Leslie Titmuss wheels and deals, manipulating a local parliamentary election from far behind the scenes. The puppet on his string is Labour candidate Terry Flitton, who is only too ready, in the manner of real-life liberals on both sides of the ocean, to hug the center of the political spectrum in order to get elected. Again echoing obvious real-life parallels, Terry is brought down by scandal, and if it is orchestrated by Titmuss, our fair-haired labourite is more than ready to help in his own demise. Though the author's wit remains finely tuned, this novel lacks the multidimensional impact of its predecessors. Mortimer capably blasts every clay pigeon lofted in his direction, but target shooting has its limits as a spectator sport. Fine satire but without the tragicomic edge we've come to expect from the series. Bill Ott Review The Sound of Trumpets has a Dickensian range.... a wonderful comic novel, but underneath its humor runs a black shadow of pessimism. -- The New York Times Book Review, Alison Lurie 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.