Mrs. Medwin Book

These remain my favorite short stories of all time. Saki's caustic wit and social subversion are wickedly funny. The central protagonist, Clovis, is a trickster to the bone who can rarely resist an opportunity to upset the social apple cart, even if the fallout lands on himself. While there are other authors who depict a slice of upper class British life in the pre-WWI period, the putative innocence of this age (e.g. in P.G. Wodehouse) is revealed by Saki to have swirling undercurrents of human cruelty and the bleak meaninglessness heard in the happy but empty tinkling sounds of tea time. And while Clovis rejects conventional morality he finds joy and transcendence in being fully in the world. He fondly remembers the ecstasy of devouring a perfectly ripe peach as a child, and to complete the experience, drops the peach pit down the neck of another child who assumed in terror that the pit was a giant spider. "A thoughtless child would have thrown it away," Clovis reminisces. This worldview is wonderfully encapsulated when Clovis remarks during lunch that "I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion."

Clovis anticipates the later invention of the rebellious teenager, the generation gap, and the backlash to the dream of suburban bliss (in the songs of the Kinks, for example). Yet Munro himself was deeply principled, volunteering as an enlisted man in his 40s to serve in WWI despite offers to make him an officer kept far from harm. He was shot and killed, leaving us to wonder what he would have written following the great war.