Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett comes from The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction 10 out of 10

 Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett comes from The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction

10 out of 10

 

 

Manservant and Maidservant is a fabulous, hilarious, stupendous Magnum opus which lives in obscurity (let us hope that this note does something to change that and from the two people who might read it, at least fifty percent would take on the book…incidentally, you can rent it from the https://archive.org/ which seems to work as a phenomenal online library) given that it only has a few hundred ratings on goodreads, while Fifty Shades of Grey has about 2.2 million people that have read it…

 

Which goes to prove that humans are much more interested in titillation than the exquisite, brainy, provocative (in other ways, above the waist), intellectual chef d’oeuvre that combines wondrous humor with what nearly becomes a crime story, getting the readers acquainted with marvelous characters, from the Manservant and Maidservant, to their masters and then the shopkeeper who cannot read, Miss Buchanan.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Horace Lamb is the Master of the house (almost literally in that age) and to begin with, he is very similar to, if not worse than The Miser of Moliere http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-miser-by-moliere.html for he keeps his five children, the rest of the family, his wife, Charlotte, and his cousin, Mortimer, together with the dependents and servants in cold and he makes every effort to save on food, starving the aforementioned, to save money for himself.

 

The fortune belongs to his spouse, but he if somehow accumulates wealth on the side, embezzling it practically, he would have a lot for himself, this is his plan in the beginning and to paraphrase William Boyd – one of the absolute favorites of the undersigned – we know about tis due to the privilege of reading, given that unlike in real life, where we do not know what others think (or in many cases how they function without thinking, as in the case of the deplorables that worship the Very Stable Genius), in novels the author tells us and thus we know all that the different characters think about various situations…

Seeing as it is impossible to live with this tyrant (small Trump indeed, the orange buffoon is also known to refuse to pay taxes and services he has received) Horace Lamb and Charlotte plan to run away and elope from this vicious man, who is so despotic and mean, to the point of sadism, making scenes when a decent (maybe even feeble) fire is present in the fireplaces where for most of the time there is no coal…

 

This premature environmentalist is not concerned about the pollution caused by coal, but by the money he loses from transactions and he is also very stern, nay, worse, with the children who fear him to the point where they declare that they wish they were dead and when a climax is reached in the narrative, and Horace Lamb is near death, Jasper and Marcus, the eldest and second son respectively, would say that they had been so used with the notion of death that they did not really think the situation through.

 

Gideon Doubleday is brought in the house as a tutor for the children and then his mother, Gertrude, and his sister, Magdalen, invite Horace and Mortimer, together with their aunt, Emilia, to have tea at their house and both women hosts become interested in one of the Lambs, the mother in Horace, and the daughter in his cousin, and seeing that Charlotte had gone to see her ailing father, it looks like this may be a propitious period, especially given that Gertrude Doubleday pretends to know about things, with her remarkable intuition and sixth sense…she does not say it in this manner, but it is what she thinks, I guess…

Miss Buchanan is a shop owner with a remarkable ability to hide the fact that she is illiterate, but the handicap had made her so suspicious and anxious that her secret might be known, that she has no friends and lives a strange life…to bring more business to her small place, she had invited villagers to get their mail there, and this is very attractive for those who have some secret correspondence they want to hide, like Charlotte and Mortimer, only when a letter from Charlotte arrives, in lands into the hands of Gertrude Doubleday.

 

She passes on to her daughter, but seeing as Magdalen is infatuated with Mortimer Lamb, she keeps the letter and furthermore (spoiler alert, in case you have reached this far and may think about taking on this spectacular, mesmerizing masterpiece, a very unlikely hypothesis, I mean all these elements combined, especially the notion that somebody is still following all this note) the lets the envelope drop in the Lamb house…

What follows is a dramatic change, for the once ruthless, monstrous Horace Lamb becomes more human, the firs are not extinguished as if they could cause the wild damage we see now in some many forests around the world, the children are allowed to eat more than the absolute minimum, and the feeling is that things can improve – unless of course, the skinflint does not return to his old ways…

 

However, one climax follows another, and Horace Lamb is nearly killed, when he comes close to abridge which is under repair and when he returns, he finds that Jasper and Marcus had been informed of the death danger and they would not tell their father – they had actually thought for some moments that their father could die, and in the past, when he had been such a devil, they had welcomed the prospect – and therefore the parent accused them of wanting to murder him, and not just once.

The developments would be so well suited for one of the best crime stories (indeed, our glorious teacher of Literature, Anton Chevorchian, used to say that Magnum opera have a crime story in them, one example would be Crime and Punishment of course) for Horace Lamb returns to the bridge, when there is no sign about the peril, and he is for the second time about to enter the other world and he is sure for some time that it would be his same sons that would be responsible for an attempt on his life…