Guest Review

REVIEW

Christmas with Dull People. By Saki. London: Daunt Books, 2017.

BY Charlotte Haley

'Things We lost in the Fire' cover image

Christmas with Dull People

Misanthropy is an intoxicating force in this snappy quartet of Saki’s short stories, but does the spirit of the holidays accidentally shine through?

Saki (1870-1916), the pen name of H. H. Munro, is an enigmatic figure. My personal experience with him culminated in my undergraduate dissertation, an exploration of how Saki’s Gabriel-Ernest (1909) had links to Ancient Roman werewolf lore. When the EFL’s Senior Library Assistant, Ross Jones, suggested Saki’s Christmas with Dull People might bring a festive theme to my contemplation of short story collections, I couldn’t ignore the opportunity for comparison. This was a selection of stories I had no cause to read during my dissertation research, and I wondered how much of the viciousness of Saki’s beast-based narratives would be present in his seasonal stories.

The collection did not disappoint. Published by Daunt Books in 2017, this skinny edition of four of Saki’s Christmas-themed tales is dressed much like a tree ornament with an expletive written across it. Deceptively sweet, the book contains stories set in the middle-class homes of Edwardian England, bubbling with bitterness and cruelty.

From collections like Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), I knew Saki to combine social commentary with fantasy and horror to an unsettling, often comic, effect. In Christmas with Dull People, however, it is the depressing realism of the holidays that protagonists and narrators attempt to convey, and which even drives them to extreme measures. In the first two stories, Reginald, one of Saki’s best-loved narrators, exudes a Wildean disdain for everything around him. Reginald’s Christmas Revel culminates in the titular party-pooper protesting a game of charades by faking a suicide. In Reginald on Christmas Presents, he pontificates on the pros and cons of various predictable gifts from various predictable aunts, with a strong aversion particularly to the George, Prince of Wales Prayer Book.

Despite the middle-class blandness which Saki loves to parody in the Reginald stories and so many others, there is a sort of raw emotion in the character’s vehement refusal to get along with people, and his aggressive and cruel ways of rejecting politeness and custom. Though these powerful rejections are perhaps better suited to the spirit of carnival than Christmas, a time of togetherness, there is something festive in Saki’s explosive extremes. In his world, festivity is about excitement, outrage, and breaking tradition. The punishment that is staying with ‘dull people’, says Reginald, is worse than a defeat. One can imagine the same Grinch-like spirit in Reginald’s nasty prank as that which lurks beneath an obnoxiously bellowed midnight carol, purposely waking up the neighbours.

In fact, Saki explores this festive disregard for peace in Bertie’s Christmas Eve, when a group of boisterous partygoers disrupts the subdued, restrained evening of the Steffink family – with Bertie Steffink’s help. The ‘motor-load’ of rowdy visitors are like the wassailers of the Middle Ages, labourers and farm workers who would demand food and drink of their feudal lords in seasonal song. This proto-carolling grew to hold a violent threat as it developed through the generations: if a household refused to comply with the request of the crowd, the home would be cursed, or worse. The spirit of ‘we won’t go until we get some’ is certainly present in the revellers of Saki’s story, and even in Bertie’s commitment to ruin his family’s muted fun. He demands that they replace their quiet Christmases with a new tradition: shaking up wealthy households and disturbing neighbours. In his consistent critique of a polite, predictable Christmas, Saki seems to demand this too.

When it became apparent that the plot of this story revolves around the myth of animals gaining the power of speech on Christmas Eve, I was hopeful that the Saki I recognised might make an appearance. My mind raced with ideas of anthropomorphised sheep and demonic, singing cows. Instead, the story is thrust along by an especially mean-spirited character in Bertie. Having locked his family in the cow-house as they try to catch the animals talking, Bertie holds a loud, drunken gathering in his family home. One can’t help but feel that the Steffinks – excited to indulge in some harmless fun – are being punished for such a lacklustre performance of festivity. Bertie wants excess and excitement, just like Reginald.

Down Pens, the final tale of this bite-sized collection, concerns the writing of thank-you letters after receiving presents you didn’t want from people you don’t like. Though it reads like a conversation from The Importance of Being Earnest or an extended Seinfeld gag, Saki’s caustic wit is best exhibited here, pointing out the hypocrisies and contradictions of middle-class gift-giving. In combination, the four stories allow a sense of the writer’s distinct tone to come through by exploring Christmas Scrooge-style, but they also question whether Christmas is the best time for politeness and custom, or whether things ought to be a bit more on the wild side.

Charlotte Haley is a recent graduate of Regent’s Park College (2020), with a BA in Classics and English. For the last year, she has been working in Switzerland as a Gallery Assistant for a rare book dealer (while frantically trying to learn German!). Since graduating, she has co-written a short film about sexual health,The Clinic, produced by the BBC Arts New Creatives programme, and won the Kunsthalle Basel’s Online Writing Workshop in May of 2021 for her poem, I Like Basel But. Charlotte’s writing of all forms, published or otherwise, can be found on her blog, IOLIS (I Only Like It Sometimes). Her pronouns are she/they.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *