The Summer of a Dormouse

By John Mortimer

Book Overview

In this, the third installment of his memoirs, John Mortimer, best known as the creator of the Rumpole stories, describes what it is like to be seventy-seven years old but to feel like an eleven-year-old at heart. Though he suffers from the afflictions with which his father contended-asthma, glaucoma-and has added some of his own, he continues to live with boundless energy, passion, and humor. While most people his age are in full retirement, Mortimer is still motoring through life-traveling to Edinburgh with a substitute wife, lunching with prisoners, and dealing with common politicians. Wherever he goes-London, Tuscany, Morocco-Mortimer embraces life and work with enthusiasm, revealing himself as one of the most astute and generous figures of his generation. "If Mortimer is a dormouse, he is definitely a mouse that roars." (San Francisco Chronicle ) "Mortimer is an entertainer, yet his book addresses serious themes, declines at all turns to condescend to the reader, is written with grace and humor, and manages unfailingly to amuse." (The Washington Post Book World)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0142001260
• ISBN13: 9780142001264
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 7.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 0.6" x 5.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Aedes Gliris

Mortimer, with what I'm sure was a subtle twinkle in his eye, had the words Aedes Gliris -- Latin for "Summer of a Doormouse" -- stitched onto his shirts, as a motto for a happy life that in retrospect passed quickly. This book made me smile very often, with its understated hilarity and reminiscences of adventures that would exhaust most men, never mind a man of 80 years. Mortimer celebrates his good fortunes in art, in the law, and in love. We learn that women friends had dubbed him "the thinking woman's crumpet." I enjoyed this small book, but then I should confess to having read all the Rumpole stories many times. I see Mortimer as full of joy, self-effacing, and very wise at this time of his life. May he write much more.

A Man in His Best Season

Everybody and their brother and sister, which includes Gertrude Stein, of course, seems to be penning memoirs. A caveat to the form practiced at its best: The memoir of a man nearly eighty should be read quickly. In part to raise demand - if the recounting is revisited in prose artfully and summons forth a brilliant life - for a return engagement of cottage industriousness from the un-retiring pensioner, and chiefly because the best memoirs offer frothy recollections and musings which naturally propel alacrity. In the case of "The Summer of a Dormouse" by John Mortimer, the episodic visits taken around the world and within the circle of the celebrated novelist, Queen's Counsel, playwright, knight (bearing a unique coat of arms), and "champagne socialist" end all too soon. We need some levity to dispel the infirmities of old age, septuagenarian John Mortimer advises. The adapter of "Brideshead Revisited," Mortimer compares his life to scriptwriting's pace, "scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end." And sped-up indeed it is for Mortimer. He plays the strolling scribe and player, from the "Chiantishire" to San Francisco and Watford to Antibes, respectively. He loosely adapts Franco Zeffirelli's life in "Tea with Mussolini" and Laurie Lee's (with whom he worked in government films during WWII) "Cider with Rosie"; for the former he is whisked off to Cinecitta - enclave of la dolce vita for the film industry set. Back in London, Sir John chairs the Royal Court Theatre's - presenter of George Bernard Shaw and John Osborne - rebuilding. Despite stupefying behind the scrim skirmishes, he soldiers on through meetings with overly sensitive playwrights of the cut-off-your-nose-in-spite-your-face variety. Finally, Mortimer's common sense prevails and the theatre gets built. The redoubtable David Hare, none the worse for bygone artistic differences, writes a play for the new stage. Goaded by a politico hostess to "have a go" at [then] Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, this former barrister uses a lunch encounter to argue the defense of civil liberties and Magna Carta, and he hosts another lunch, a fundraiser on behalf of prison reformation, where a CEO is drilled over the company's annual report by a major stockholder--a convict--at the prison's groaning board. He also dispatches his opinion to the newspaper on the crisis in farming, easily deducible from the vantage point of his countryside home that is roundly ignored by Tony Blair's New Labour government. In fact, Mortimer questions whether "the promised land of a Labour Britain" looks or acts any different from its Conservative Party predecessor. Mortimer recalls, from his youth, the Shakespearean passages his father quoted and conjures the blinded in middle age, intrepid, yet reliant for personal matters such as daily dressing on his wife (Mortimer's own Shavian, strong-willed mother), barrister that mirrors Mortimer's own age-related frailties - from use of a wheelchair to not bei

Not going gently into that dark night.....

SUMMER OF A DORMOUSE takes it's title from Byron who said when one subtracts sleeping, eating and other personal maintenance one has about as much time to be productive as the summer of a dormouse. Of course Lord Byron himself was quite productive until he was bled dry by leeches says John Mortimer whose wife gave him a ring with an engraved dormouse on his last birthday.DORMOUSE is Mortimer's third installment in his autobiography (the official one, Rumpole is unofficial). In his earlier entries (CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE, MURDERERS AND OTHER FRIENDS) he covered his childhood, life with wife number one (Penny) and wife number two (Penelope) as well as his writing and legal career through age 65 or so. In DORMOUSE, Mortimer continues the tale covering recent events in his seventies (with flashbacks). Mortimer has not slowed down very much though he is blind in one eye and forced to use wheeled conveyences through air port terminals (sometimes at the risk of life and limb) as he whizzes around the globe on various book-signing tours and other business trips. For instance, during the 1990s he was busy writing the screen play for the film 'Tea with Mussolini' -- an autobiographical account of Franco Zefirelli's boyhood in wartime Italy starring Dames of the British Empire Judy Dench and Maggie Smith as well as Lady Joan Plowright. As a result of his involvement, he has been privy to the behind the scenes antics of the old gals. Seems these pillars of the theatre were caught nude in Franco Zefirelli's swimming pool one afternoon. (I knew Dench couldn't possibly be as dull as her biographer suggested!!)Mortimer has literary flashbacks, amazing tales to convey, and engages in a bit of reflection as he faces "Timor mortis" which he says becomes rather acute after age 75. During the course of his book, several old friends and his first wife Penelope exit the stage. From time to time he feels like throwing in the towel himself but something always seems to come along set him going again. For example, the ulcer on his leg hasn't healed and after two years it seems to have become a permanent part of his anatomy when he encounters two twins who suggest he try an alternative approach to healing. From Mortimer's perspective some politicians seem bent on destroying England, so he and wife Penny do what they can to stall the barbarians at the gate. As friends of the Kinnocks, the Mortimers find much to take on including the movement by the "politically correct" to deny accused rapists access to cross-examination of the accuser. Sometimes the local populace is with the Mortimers and sometimes not. For example, they are not opposed to fox-hunting--which earns them the enmity of extremist animal lovers who send very bad things through the post. From the scuba diver scooped up and dropped on a blazing forest fire which leads to an insurance battle over the cause of death, to the lightening struck movie star with a melted phone receiver in his hand, to wife Penny's