Saki (H.H.Munro) - The Best of Saki (Picador)

There’s a lot to like about Saki’s extremely short stories.  They juxtapose buttoned up, conventional Edwardian upper-middle class society with unexpected savagery and brutality.  Amusing hi-jinx and practical jokes abound with varying degrees of success but I think most people would find something at least mildly enjoyable in this collection.

Saki creates credible scenes and characters with incredible economy and was obviously a shrewd and critical observer of the society around him.  Tyrannical aunts, busy-body society housewives and put-upon children are all sketched with ease and elan.

After a while, the stories become a bit formulaic.  A lovely, posh, jolly hockey sticks sort of weekend house party, or situation, is disrupted by a reminder of the savage side of life.  Very often, this is an actual animal.  The more ferocious or exotic the better.   The prim and proper veneer of social convention disappears and chaos duly ensues.  Usually, everything is alright in the end and it transpires that a child has got one over on the adults or that a witty man-child like Clovis has played a hilarious practical joke on the stuffy elders.  It's true that not all the stories have a happy ending and some finish with people dead or dying.  However, orders are inverted and conventions overthrown with such regularity that the impact becomes somewhat diminished.

By the end of the book, in spite of the fact that I was bored and found the stories a bit repetitive, it’s undeniable that the best ones were enjoyable and pleasing.  My favorites were ‘The Stake’, about a young gambler who loses access to ready funds and secretly gambles away the family’s cherished cook, and ‘Fate’ about a billiards player who invents a crisis to avoid finishing a game he is about to lose.  All told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Saki.  I really liked a couple of stories but, in the end, his prose style is a bit prim and proper and even though he is sending up the society he lives in, I feel like he does so in a way that’s a bit twee and formulaic.