Isherwood's Kuno von Pregnitz (Mr. Norris Changes Trains) and the Premise of Golding's The Lord of the Flies
William Golding explicitly confirmed the influence of R. A. Ballantyne's boys' book The Coral Island on his early life and his subsequent writing. He spoke of the 1858 novel rotting to compost in his mind and of a new myth later putting down roots in the compost. This note explores the possibility that this new growth was fertilized from another literary source that Golding would have known, Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris Changes Trains. The Coral Island tells of three boys, Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin, who survive a storm at sea and shipwreck, and find refuge on a South Pacific island. Here they recreate a replica of the society they have known and, less knowingly, a facsimile of a British colony in the South Seas. The boys have distinct but complementary personalities. The Coral Island is somewhat cryptically alluded to in Isherwood's tale of Alfred Norris, a jack of several nefarious trades: man about town, con artist, blackmailer, faux communist, and would be spy master. Isherwood's proxy, William Bradshaw (the author's two middle names) meets Norris on a train to Berlin in the early 1930s. Norris is also a procurer and hopes to find some reward by introducing Bradshaw to a German aristocrat, Kuno von Pregnitz, initially characterized by the narrator, Bradshaw, as "fishy and suave" (Ch. 3) Bradshaw does not immediately succumb to von Pregnitz's dubious charms, but after a brief period of coolness the two meet again for tea in the study of the baron's Berlin residence. Von Pregnitz shyly reveals a secret passion, thus far only partly realized at his summer house on a lake, where he had gathered a group of handsome, working class young men: The narrator continues: