Novel: Like Men Betrayed

Overview

John Mortimer's Like Men Betrayed is a sharp, satirical novel set in early 1960s England that examines how private desires and public decorum collide. The narrative follows an ordinary, ostensibly respectable protagonist whose life is gradually unstitched by a series of betrayals, both committed and suffered, against the compact of social expectation. Mortimer uses the character's disintegration to probe the costs of compromise, the petty cruelties of small-town respectability, and the corrosive effect of living by appearances.

Plot

The story charts the unraveling of a middle-class man embedded in conventional institutions: marriage, work and social networks that trade in deference and quiet corruption. As intimacies and ambitions are tested, small acts of disloyalty, an unguarded confession, a reused lie, a private indulgence, multiply until the protagonist finds himself isolated by the very conventions that once promised security. Encounters with colleagues, neighbors and intimates expose layered hypocrisies: friends who counsel restraint while indulging secret freedoms, spouses who manage appearances at the cost of honesty, and authorities who enforce rules selectively. The plot moves with a blend of comic observation and accumulating unease, transforming interpersonal slights into a critique of social constraint.

Themes

Central concerns are betrayal in its many registers and the moral compromises demanded by social survival. Mortimer inspects how people rationalize their actions to preserve identity and status, and how those rationalizations erode trust. The novel interrogates the difference between public virtue and private vice, showing how institutions, family, profession, class, shape behavior through both coercion and seduction. Alongside this moral inquiry runs an interest in male identity and vulnerability: the title's invocation of "men betrayed" points to the ways men are taught to conceal weakness, leading not to strength but to self-betrayal.

Style and Tone

Mortimer's prose is economical, urbane and mordantly witty, moving between light comedic episodes and moments of caustic clarity. Dialogue carries much of the novel's energy; the characters' speech reveals social hierarchies and the ironies of self-justification. The tone is elegiac without being preachy: humor softens judgment while irony exposes the futility of certain social games. Mortimer's legal and theatrical sensibilities shape scene construction and timing, producing a narrative that feels both stagewise and forensic in its dissections.

Reception and Legacy

Upon publication, the novel was recognized for its perceptive social observation and Mortimer's ability to skew public pieties with a precise, often merciless pen. Critics noted the work's capacity to make the reader laugh at characters while simultaneously feeling pity for them, a balance that marks much of Mortimer's fiction. Over time the book has been read as part of Mortimer's ongoing exploration of hypocrisy and moral compromise, a thematic through-line that culminates in his later legal dramas. Like Men Betrayed remains a compact study of how ordinary lives are compromised by the need to appear respectable, and why that need so frequently produces the very betrayals it seeks to avoid.