Review: In Brief Authority

In Brief Authority by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While it isn't quite the ever-escalating farce that Anstey did so well in The Tinted Venus or The Brass Bottle , and is neither as packed with incident or as comedic as either of them, this is an amiable comedy set in England and Fairyland in 1914. The advent of the First World War leads to an author's introductory note excusing the use of German names from the Brothers Grimm, and an epilogue which abandons comedy and talks seriously about the war.

The story involves a suburban English family with pretensions to be upper-middle-class; the husband, Sidney, is a partner in a firm which does something, I don't remember what (maybe it was never specified), but is ignored by his senior partner whenever he suggests anything; the wife is a social climber with absolutely zero ability at self-reflection or self-critique, and nobody has as high an opinion of her as she has herself; the older daughter has pretensions to be an intellectual, but has no real grasp of the subjects she goes to hear lectures about (including the philosophy of Nietzsche, which almost leads to disaster later on when she encourages a love interest to adopt it); the son would like to be one of P.G. Wodehouse's idle, useless rich idiots, but isn't rich, and has just been sacked from his job for being idle and useless and a bit of an idiot; only the younger daughter, who's about 10, is anything like a decent human being. Her governess, Daphne Heritage, is, it turns out, the heir to the throne of a fairytale kingdom, though she's unaware of this, and sells her employer a pendant she inherited from her father to cover a debt incurred by her late mother. The pendant is the mark of the heir, and so when a representative of the kingdom turns up, he mistakes the mother of the family for the queen, and they are installed as the royal family of Märchenland (Fairytale Land) in the capital city of Eswareinmal (German for "Once Upon a Time," if I'm not mistaken).

Nobody except the family themselves consider themselves remotely qualified for this job, especially the supposed Queen Selina, and they proceed to make a mess of things. The son, Clarence, is now rich... but still idle, useless, and a bit of an idiot, and bored because nobody will play golf with him and he can't get any cigarettes. Daphne is smart enough not to give in to his rather half-hearted attempts to woo her, particularly since his intention is for her to be his mistress rather than his princess (he doesn't use the word "mistress", but it's clear enough what he means).

Various people get engaged, or are supposed to get engaged but don't, and meanwhile the rather doddery old Court Godmother, who isn't as good at manipulation as she ought to be, discovers the mistaken identity. Since it was partly her mistake, she doesn't necessarily want to announce it, but she uses it as leverage to try to resolve the situation as she feels it should be resolved, with mixed success.

Everyone's plans go awry, in fact, since nobody is particularly bright or competent, and a difficult time is had by all before we get a good fairy-tale ending - somewhat brought down by the ensuing realities of the war in the epilogue, in which Clarence finally does become good for something.

It's not by any means my favourite Anstey book, but it's amusing, and worth a read.

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