Reviews for The Chronicles of Clovis

The average rating for The Chronicles of Clovis based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-10 00:00:00 Vladislav Vilensky "In a world that is supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs. Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton." Sentences like the above are true gems, or rather tiny mosaics of gems. It is not only that every single word falls exactly into place - quite mosaic-like - but what is said is also remarkably truthful: It did not take me a lot of introspection to bring my own Mrs. Packletide to daylight because there have been moments, and there will be, when my own particular dislike of someone made me think of that person more than would have been required by that person's degree of importance or intellect. Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pen name of Saki, seems to have been very good at creating little mosaics like this as can be seen from the collection of short stories The Chronicles of Clovis, a bunch of tales that mainly satirize Edwardian mores but also give insight into human nature as such. The eponymous Clovis is a young man in his early twenties, well-heeled, reasonably well-educated and a typical representative of the British jeunesse dorée. His tendency to self-centredness shows most remarkably when the baby of a family he is staying with as a guest has gone missing, and he is more worried about the sauce that is going to be served at lunch that day. He also dabbles amiably in playing pranks on other people - as for example in The Unrest-Cure, where he tries, quite successfully, to get a middle-aged clergyman and his sister out of their tedious ruts, or in The Recessional, where he undergoes the mental throes of writing an ode with the sole aim of spiting a young poetess. He is, however, primarily an observer or a story-teller rather than a man given over-much to action, and although from the glimpses we get of him we are able to draw a pretty detailed character sketch, he is more of an author's device to knit the various stories together under the heading of The Chronicles of Clovis. Saying this, there are a few stories where Clovis does not make any appearance at all, among which figure two rather eerie tales, namely Sredni Vashtar and The Music on the Hill. Sredni Vashtar, which is a masterpiece and would deserve a review of its own, is about a sickly little boy, his animal god and his mean-spirited cousin, who probably intends to hurry the boy to his early grave, but then finds the tables suddenly turned, whereas The Music of the Hill reminded me of Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen. Most other tales in this collection could be classified as satirical or grotesque, as for example Tobermory, which is one of my favourite stories, and which deals with a man who has developed a method of teaching animals to talk human language. The house party of whom he makes one member demand proof of this, and get more than they have bargained for in the shape of the hosts' cat Tobermory, and soon the family plot ways of how to get rid of the cat who talks too much. The already-mentioned The Unrest-Case cruelly shows us how most average people would probably react when faced with a gross crime that is so much out of the ordinary that one can hardly believe what is going on. Together with Esmé, this story flaunts such a biting and sarcastic humour that it would easily make Saki another object of cancel culture in our highly prim and proper society today. How could he get away with it at the beginning of the last century? Other stories are more conventional and more comfortably humorous but still genuinely breath-taking with the witticisms you can come across while reading them. To conclude this little review, here are some of my favourite gems gleaned from this collection: "'[…] I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English. […]'" "The wine lists had been consulted, by some with the blank embarrassment of a schoolboy suddenly called on to locate a Minor Prophet in the tangled hinterland of the Old Testament, by others with the severe scrutiny which suggests that they have visited most of the higher-priced wines in their own homes and probed their family weaknesses." "'When love is over, how little of love even the lover understands,' quoted Clovis to himself." "'I don't want Wratislav. My poor Elsa would be miserable with him.' 'A little misery wouldn't matter very much with her; it would go so well with the way she does her hair, and if she couldn't get on with Wratislav she could always go and do good among the poor.'" "In the same way, whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out 'under orders' from somewhere or another, no one seems to think that there are people who might LIKE to kill their neighbours now and then." "'Discipline to be effective must be optional.'" "'Who are those depressed-looking young women who have just gone by?' asked the Baroness; 'they have the air of people who have bowed to destiny and are not quite sure whether the salute will be returned.'" "'I am sure I don't know what I should do without Florinda,' admitted Mrs. Troyle; 'she understands my hair. I've long ago given up trying to do anything with it myself. I regard one's hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is seen together in public one's private divergences don't matter. […]'"

Review # 2 was written on 2007-06-25 00:00:00 Bryan Schmidt 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.