Review: The Tinted Venus

The Tinted Venus by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A comic treatment of a theme that Prosper Merimee, in his La Venus de Ille , treated as horror. The source for both was a medieval legend of a young man who accidentally betroths himself to Venus by putting a ring on her statue; the elderly scholar who advises the hero at one point mentions William Morris's poem The Earthly Paradise as a source, though he's very unreliable and I can't find it in there, nor is it likely to have been in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the other source he mentions. The earliest known version of the story is by William of Malmesbury, but it was often retold by other medieval writers.

This version of the story involves a young London hairdresser, Leander, whose friend drops him into an awkward situation; the friend is engaged to the sister of a young woman who Leander had previously been interested in, before meeting Mathilda, now his fiancée, and the friend has arranged a trip to the Rosherwich Pleasure Gardens (a transparent pseudonym for the actual Rosherville Gardens) along with the two sisters. Leander tries to get out of it, but in the end has to explain to Ada, his former interest, that she's been superseded by Mathilda. In the course of the conversation, he mentions Mathilda's small hands, and demonstrates by putting the engagement ring he happens to have just picked up from a jeweler (who has altered it to fit Mathilda; it's a family ring of Leander's) on the notably small hand of a statue of Venus in the sculpture garden.

Unfortunately, this brings the statue to life, infused with the power and personality of the goddess, and she insists that he's committed himself to be hers. He has to resist her attempts to take him away to her isle of Cyprus as her lover (he's not attracted to her, and is faithful to his Mathilda), while also dealing with the fact that the statue, which was stolen property before it ended up in the sculpture garden, is being sought by both the police and the criminals who had parked it there until the hue and cry died down. His case becomes more and more desperate, as he tries to do the right thing and extricate himself from the situation.

The title refers to his subterfuge of applying makeup (which he invents and compounds as part of his business) to the statue to make it attract less attention when it walks around in London.

One thing I didn't like about the book was that the author makes mockery of this honest and good-hearted tradesman for his lack of education, though he also has the scene with the elderly and disagreeable scholar, who is portrayed as unpleasant and snobbish when he mocks Leander for his ignorance (despite his own unreliable memory). Still, Leander comes across as a hapless but well-intentioned, honest and faithful person, and he does eventually solve his problem himself by his own intelligence. His Mathilda is also very understanding and forgiving, once she understands what's going on, and faithful to him in turn. They are portrayed positively for rejecting the wild sexuality represented by Venus and remaining within respectable bounds; apparently this is not so much the case with the 1921 silent film based on the book, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and very much not the case with the 1941 musical A Touch of Venus, also based on this book.

I found it amusing, more for the farcical shenanigans than the hero's malapropisms and ignorant errors. It's not comparable to classic Wodehouse, but then when it was published nor was Wodehouse (as another reviewer has remarked); I'd say it's as funny as Three Men on the Bummel , though not as funny as Three Men in a Boat . It's not the author's best-known work, either, so I might take a look at some of the others.

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