Antic Hay
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A.Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God.
Standing in front of the spread brass eagle and fortified in his convictions by the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy (for this first Sunday of term was the Fifth after Easter), the Reverend Pelvey could speak of these things with an enviable certainty. ‘Hear, O Israel,’ he was booming out over the top of the portentous Book: ‘the Lord our God is one Lord.’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Huxley's Brave New World will find glimmers of that book's dark humor and sterling powers of observation in this stellar 1923 lampoon of English intellectualism after WWI. Protagonist Theodore Gumbril Jr. teaches at an insignificant prep school for boys, work he pursues with little enthusiasm. "You weren't sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it," his father says. "That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds." Gumbril performs scarcely better in a harebrained business venture, having quit his post and laid his hopes on making a fortune by selling "trousers with pneumatic seats," an idea that came to him while sitting on the school chapel's uncomfortable pews. What ensues is an uproarious kaleidoscope of character sketches as Gumbril tries to drum up interest in his project from a series of London acquaintances. Among them are Shearwater, a dilettante medical enthusiast; Lypiatt, a failed artist and self-proclaimed "man of genius"; Mercaptan, a bloviating critic; and world-weary socialite Mrs. Myra Viveash. The story isn't really about the pants, but about the men's failures. Each of them fumbles at profundity while trying to gain the affections of the beautiful Myra, which adds an entertaining dimension to Huxley's excoriating depiction of self-seriousness and idleness. It's a riot.
