With matriarchal arrogance, the mother rules Isherwood's first two novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial, written just before his Berlin books…. In the later novels, after [Isherwood's] conversion to Vedanta, mother figures become kind, even saintly, as [he] no longer postures as the young man "angry with the family and its official representatives."… (pp. 19-20)

Although Isherwood chafed against all authority, particularly its initial manifestation in his mother, his first novel cannot be classed either as a manifesto of independence or as a polemic in the same way that D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can. All the Conspirators is a portrait of the artist as a hapless mother's boy unable to sever his ties to mother and to home. Isherwood exposes not only the Edwardian manners of the older generation but also the postwar...