Review: An Experiment in Gyro-Hats

An Experiment in Gyro-Hats by Ellis Parker Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A mildly amusing short tale with a speculative element, though it's there to provide comedy with its absurdity, not to be an actual speculation. A lot of the humour consists in "look at how seriously this small-minded middle-class tradesman takes himself," which is never a favourite direction for me.

The narrator is a hatter, whose daughter has fallen in love with a man who reels and staggers when he walks. They at first assume he's a drinker, even though he's never been seen to take a drink, but the hatter decides to invent a Gyro-Hat to help him walk straight anyway. It turns out that his staggering is because, as a child, he got caught on a rotating turntable that his father had invented to turn balky mules around and spun on it for hours at high speed before he was rescued; the Gyro-Hat, by going wrong, spins him in the opposite direction and "unwinds" him, curing him completely. Along the way, the hatter, testing the hat, drinks for the first time, gets roaring drunk, and wanders up a set of iron railings in his Gyro-Hat, perfectly stable.

It's silly and absurd and, as I say, mildly amusing.

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