Customer Reviews

Miss Mapp: Including, The Male Impersonator

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A funny, biting comedy of manners that's a delight to connoisseurs of embarrassment such as myself. The title character is a preening, nosy, gossiping small-town English woman whose entire life is a sort of game of oneupmanship. This sort of totally self-involved, unreflective character is the soul of much comedy (exploited, for example, as the lead character in the British sitcom "Keeping Up Appearances," with whom I mentally equated Miss Mapp)--but the brilliant thing here is that EVERYBODY in the town, not just Mapp, is the same sort of game-player. (Well, almost everybody.) Their constant attempts to socially out-maneuver each other offer up some hilariously embarrassing consequences. Probably my favorite is when the bombastic military buddies Major Benjy and Captain Puffin fight, and Puffin is challenged to a deul. He tries to run away--cursing himself for "befriending the sort of man who would bring deuling into the modern world"--only to run into Major Benjy at the train station, himself trying to flee. Of course, each attempts to bluff the other with casualness and avoid any further unpleasantries.

These antics are presented in serial form and do get repetitious, but Benson never lacks for wit or spite (he even kills Puffin, when it comes to it). Nicely squirmy.

This book was recommended to me as an analog to the film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"--was going to say I didn't see how they fit together, but now I do: the constantly cycling game of oneupmanship. Except of course in the Western it's all done with open direct confrontation rather than quiet social scheming.--J.Ruch