ABSTRACT
The most entertaining book I ever knew was a three-pounder called The Popular Handbook of Curious Information, Familiar Allusions and 10,000 Foreign Words and Phrases which, read through story-wise, bore me through a siege of convalescence and conferred a most discursive and elegant education. Antic Hay comes close to matching the charm of that volume, perhaps because it might be its very novelization. It has the literary delights of the intelligence questionnaire, characters who don't talk in conversations but in charades, with satire japing sophistica tion as well as the more obvious targets, engaging naughtiness narrated for its own sake, rising and falling in broad comedy and in episodes deliriously strange and tender. Out of a storage-house of second-hand conventions, tri-lingual expressions, and classical allusions inserted much as in the book I first mention, evolves something which is new; which makes it humour on its own terms; which uses devices, but not stale ones; allusions but not cliches; allying erudition and craftsmanship with a philosophy usually contrasted with those moral virtues, much as Anatole France sometimes shocks the church-going by his superior familiarity with the lives of the saints and the fathers.
