Farewell the Trumpets

"This is the third book in the Morris trilogy, which she wrote in a period of her life when she was doing something very unusual indeed, changing sex from James to Jan. There is a feyness – “fey” is a very Jan Morris word – to the whole work which I like to think is a product of this extraordinary decision that the writer had taken. She was researching the books and travelling around the former British Empire in a state of sexual ambiguity. There are probably other books on the British Empire that are more factually reliable, but none are as evocative and as beautifully written as these. She was also the absolute – I’m trying to find a non-sexual word here – queen of the dying art of the footnote. Hers are the best footnotes of any book I have ever read. They’re not sources, just wonderful asides on curious but slightly irrelevant facts, and they are absolutely adorable. The first book in the trilogy, Heaven’s Command , is about the rise of the British Empire. Then comes Pax Britannica , a portrait of the Empire as it was at its zenith, in 1897 with the diamond jubilee [of Queen Victoria]. Farewell the Trumpets is about what happened after 1897 – the long, slow decline – and it has an elegiac quality to it which I adore. It is one of the central facts of our story. When we talk about not knowing who we are, or what the name of our country is, the old Empire is a major part of that. A hundred years ago, Australians thought of themselves – and were thought of – as slightly different Englishmen, no more exotic than the Scots. Rather less so, in some ways. Even in my lifetime, Australians habitually referred to England as home, until that was knocked out of them by the Commonwealth immigration acts. We are totally bound up with the Empire. That a city like Birmingham is now on the cusp, if it hasn’t already happened, of being more than half non-white is just one of its legacies. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Well, I pity the country that isn’t nostalgic. If you don’t have an idealised past in which everything was better than it is today, it probably means that the actual past was bloody awful."