I was hoping to like this more although I couldn't tell you what I was expecting. It is at its essence about a wealthy older man at the end of his life pretty much alone except for the people he hires to take care of him. The fact that he's Noel Coward doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference. ( )

I was hoping to like this more although I couldn't tell you what I was expecting. It is at its essence about a wealthy older man at the end of his life pretty much alone except for the people he hires to take care of him. The fact that he's Noel Coward doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference. ( )

I was hoping to like this more although I couldn't tell you what I was expecting. It is at its essence about a wealthy older man at the end of his life pretty much alone except for the people he hires to take care of him. The fact that he's Noel Coward doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference. ( )

A beautifully written book about the last months of Noel Coward's life. Firefly is the name of his retreat set in the grounds of his Jamaican house, and that is where he died.
The book is like a polished gem, every word is perfectly chosen to evoke a picture of the great man struggling with his increasingly deteriorating health as memories of his childhood, theatrical triumphs and disasters, friendships and sexual encounters come and go. The relationship between him and the young Jamaican who acts as general factotum is both funny and poignant. I have already recommended this book to several friends. ( )

"Firefly" has some charming passages and achieves a nice effect in portraying the sad final years of one of the great entertainers of the mid twentieth century. I wonder though if the author's goals in writing the book were perhaps excessively modest. "Firefly" is really a novella, and it could be that it falls uneasily between the concision of a short story and the complexity of a longer novel.

It also concerns me somewhat that the book fits too easily into a cultural pattern that has been been set up recently in fictional accounts of famous persons. It's as if there's a delight in showing old people in decline, approaching death. I'm thinking of films like "Iris" - about the last years of the novelist Iris Murdoch, when she was suffering from Alzheimers - and also of "The Iron Lady," the Margaret Thatcher bio-pic. It seems like there is a trend to portray these important notables - as Janette Jenkins does also here in "Firefly" - at the end of their lives, when they have lost their powers and characteristics that made them notable, imporant and interesting in the first place. Yes, it is true that getting old can be devastating and ravaging, but I would prefer to have been shown more of what made Noel Coward a significant cultural icon in the first place - the wit, the style, the charm, the "design for living".

If people are interested in Noel Coward in 2014 - and I'm not sure that many people are - it's not because he became a doddering old fogey sitting by a swimming pool in Jamaica. ( )