Ed Grover and I share a keen enjoyment of the barbed stories of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916). For Eplovejoy's Ed Grover Appreciation Writeoff, I decided to (re?)read Saki's 1912 novel The Unbearable Bassington. Although I am not going to specify the ending, some might consider this review to contain "plot spoilers." IMO, like Oscar Wilde before him, Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh after him, what happens in Saki's novel is considerably less important than how it is expressed.

The Unbearable Bassington has the nearly vitriolic epigrammatic Saki style, but the style works better in smaller doses in the concentrated form of short stories. Not that the novel is long. It is 146 pages in the Oxford paperback edition and only 84 in The Collected Stories of Saki, but even that can feel lengthy for a book lacking any sympathetic characters.

I am not completely certain who the title character is. The obvious candidate is the shallow and terminally narcissist son Comus who is still at school at the start of the novel and, over its course, alienates everyone who could help him attain a status that would allow him to live frivolously in London, which he believes is his "natural" right.

Comus's mother, Francesca is present in the first and last scene of the book and is its (machiavellian) driving force. She is better at getting along and protecting her chances than is the son she saddled with the name "Comus." Her main priority is to keep the house in London of which she has the right to occupy until the niece of its previous owner marries. Francesca conspires to marry Comus to the future owner to keep the home that so well contains her prized possessions, but Comus sabotages this, as he does all his chances to secure the life he wants.

"Brat" seems too mild a descriptor of Comus. His petulant egocentricity might have seemed "cute"—or at least amusing—when he was a schoolboy, but, lacking an inherited fortune, it becomes tedious (for the fashionable adults and for the reader) when he is sponging about town after college. I think the label is "cad."

Comus lacks the charm and cleverness of the selfish protagonist of Saki's short stories. Unpleasant as he is—and he is very unpleasant—the fate his mother, his uncle, and his creator (Saki) have in store for him exceeds his demerits. His character is very unsympathetic, but one may wince even at the spectacle of an unsympathetic character throwing away all his chances. (I would not go so far as to find it "heart-wrenching," as Ed did in his omnibus Saki review.) Francesca, too, has a comeuppance (beyond the loss of her only child) and even a moment of regret for her part in Comus's end.

Comus's main chance—at least the one that occupies the most space within the novel—was marrying the heiress Elaine de Frey. Even though his mother wants him to do this, Comus also wants this. (Usually, discerning what she wants is sufficient to inspire him to do the opposite.) Elaine is eager to make excuses for his bad behavior, but eventually chooses Comus's friend (insofar as Comus could have a friend), a penurious, glib Opposition (Liberal Party) Member of Parliament, Courtney Youghal. As unlikeable as Comus is, the stupidity of how he manages to lose Elaine's preference is quite remarkable. The main engagement involves swans and a silver plate (shown on the cover of the edition of the novel that I have).

The introduction to the Oxford edition by Joan Aiken (that really does divulge everything of the plot) suggests that Comus Bassington was for Saki the archetypal child that Saki continued in some ways to be (and at least continued to identify himself as or with) rebelling against parents (and their generation) too-ready to sacrifice their progeny. "Filicide" is an interpretation with considerable merit of what was soon to come—World War I, in which Munro was killed—but (IMHO) it is somewhat strained to read the author's eventual fate backward into the 1912 novel.

How much social criticism of Edwardian England is intended within The Unbearable Bassington is a subject for debate. Francesca is in a difficult position, and Comus eventually is in an impossible one, but since neither of them is a charming character, it is difficult to muster sympathic concern for the peril of their social positions. (Another Jane Austen, Saki was not! His comedy was often mean-spirited.)

I thought that I would read The Unbearable Bassington in one sitting, but put it down twice and took up other books. I'm not sure whether The Unbearable Bassington is too sour and with a too unpleasant lead character or just not stylized enough. Firbank and Waugh were the novelists; Saki was the master of the short story.

The Folio Edition illustrations included in the Oxford paperback do not fit my images of the characters, but are mildly amusing.

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BTW, Munro, who was born in Burma and died in the trenches of World War I, took the name "Saki" from that of a cup bearer in The Rubayat of Omar Khayam. In antiquity, cup-bearers were pleasing to look upon (which Munro was not) and complaisantly provided more pleasures than the wine they delivered to the couches of their masters.

And there is a shot at George Bernard Shaw in the person of a self-important playwright named Sherard Blaw in The Unbearable Bassington.



Recommended: No