In reviewing P. G. Wodehouse scholar Richard Usborne’s treatment of the comic novelist’s Sunset at Blandings, Martin Amis wrote that “You would have to go back to the enchanted forests of Shakespearean comedy to find even a fleeting analogy with his fiction”. Amis places Wodehouse in the comic pastoral tradition, and names no other contemporary practitioners, since this is a form “which no intelligent writer has been able to take sincerely for several hundred years”. But there is at least a comparison if not an analogy to be made with the work of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916, pen-named Saki), an Edwardian writer of short stories, who works in what might be called a cynical pastoral mode, if those terms aren’t contradictory. The countrysides of Saki’s “Gabriel-Ernest”, “The Music on the Hill”, and “The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water” are dangerous places, while Wodehouse’s world beyond London is fresh and innocent. But both writers are known for their idiosyncratic character names and for their depictions of irascible aunts, and both, prompted by their settings and by their comic instincts, cast anthropomorphic animals and zoomorphic people in their comedies, moving with facility between those links in the Great Chain of Being.
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