Review: The Brass Bottle

The Brass Bottle by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second F. Anstey read, and like the other one ( The Tinted Venus ), it involves an ordinary honest fellow troubled by a supernatural being who interferes with his life in general and his love life in particular. It was first published in 1900, right at the end of the Victorian era, and that's very much the milieu, but if you wanted to film it (and someone really should; it has, in fact, been filmed three times, but the latest was 1964), you could probably set it in most eras, including today's, without much difficulty. Indeed, the 1964 version, with Barbara Eden as the love interest (not the genie), was apparently set in the then-present day; from Wikipedia's account, it was so Hollywoodized as to fail to capture the charm and humour of the original.

The best thing, the truly original thing, about this tale of a man who releases a genie from the brass bottle where he's been imprisoned since the time of Solomon is that the man concerned, Harold, doesn't want fame and riches, at least not without earning them for himself through hard work in his profession as an architect. He (with good evidence from his observations of public figures) believes that unearned wealth will make him miserable rather than contented. The problem is that the genie insists, over Harold's escalating protests, on rewarding him for his unwitting favour in releasing the genie with the kind of rewards that most men of the genie's time and culture would have coveted. For example, he redecorates Harold's moderate lodgings in high Eastern style when his fiancée and her parents are coming to dinner, and has slaves serve Eastern delicacies to them, when Harold's prospective father-in-law is very strict on young men being extravagant and Harold only wanted to serve a decent plain meal cooked by his landlady. Of course, Harold's love interest isn't good enough in the genie's eyes, and he sets out to break up the engagement and substitute a relative of his.

The various shenanigans of the genie are hilarious, the more so as Harold gets more and more frustrated with them, and Harold has to exercise considerable ingenuity and tact to get the genie to reverse his schemes. It's a fun ride, and clever, and original.

There's some language in it, used by Harold's landlady and landlord rather than Harold himself, that is not acceptable today (referring to the dark-skinned servants the genie conjures up; I think you know what word I mean). Apart from that, it's unobjectionable.

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