Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life Literary Elements

General fiction, short stories

Buckinghamshire country, England. The 1940’s and 1950’s.

Usually in the first-person point of view featuring an unnamed narrator assumed to be the fictional counterpart of the author. Despite being written from this point-of-view, however, the stories are mostly conveyed through the perspective of the character Claud Cubbage.

The general mood is one of rural amiability with a basically approving tone toward Claud despite the fact that in most of the stories he attempting to carry out some sort of scheme to cheat, swindle or insult others. Exceptions to this basic format include “Parson’s Pleasure” and “Rummins” in which the questionable acts are committed by other characters operating at a much higher degree of malevolence.

The protagonist of this collection of stories as a whole is Claud Cubbage. The antagonist occasionally turns out to be Cubbage as well by virtue of inadvertently obstructing his own success. More traditional and straightforward antagonists include Cyril Boggis in “Parson’s Pleasure” and the title character of “Rummins.”

Various: Crooked antiques dealer Cyril Boggis versus simple country folk. Rummins versus local drunk Ole Jimmy. Claud Cubbage versus “Mr. Hoddy,” “Mr. Feasey,” “The Ratcatcher,” and Mr. Victor Hazel.

Various: Cyril Boggis loses a valuable original Chippendale Commode through being overly clever; Ole Jimmy’s dead body is discovered hidden on the Rummins farm; Claud Cubbage’s schemes fall apart.

The generally light-hearted tone of these stories—even when they are about Claud trying to pull off some scam—occasionally takes a dark turn. One of these examples is the grotesque and rather shocking conclusion to “Rummins.” Ironically, this story starts off with one of the most pleasant visual descriptions in the collection, but the inevitable darkness begins to loom in the form of foreshadowing: “there was something disturbing about these two men…and especially Rummins himself. Rummins was frightened. Bert was frightened, too.”

The gruesome discovery of the secret at the heart of “Rummins” is never directly described, but only alluded to through a building up of tension in which the action of the present-day collides with the memories of what occurred several months earlier. The true terror of what is ultimately revealed is made all the more macabre through the understated quality of the story’s final line: “[Rummins] moved so fast he was through the gate and halfway across the road before Bert started to scream.”

Although not originally so, in the years since its publication, the story of Cyril Boggis in “Parson’s Pleasure” has become an allusion to Dahl’s later children’s tale Fantastic Mr. Fox. Not only does that story also feature an unpleasant man named Walter Boggis, but the crafty way in which Cyril Boggis outwits his victims in this book bears a ironic resemblance to clever Mr. Fox and his own ability to outwit farmers.

Animal imagery is pervasive throughout the stories in ways that compare humans to creatures. The title story uses animal husbandry as a plot device to ultimately make a revelation about human sexual relations. “The Ratcatcher” features a title character who is essentially a human rodent. Claud has a girlfriend in one story, but it is made quite clear that the true love of his life is his speedy little greyhound, Jackie. “The Champion of the World” utilizes one of Claud’s multiple schemes make to transform poaching pheasants into a social commentary on economic disparity and social status.

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The unity of the collection as a whole is constructed primarily on the foundation of parallel stories of schemes, scams and secrets going awry. These stories parallel each other despite varying widely in tone and the level of nefarious intrigue involved. This spectrum from Claud merely making up an impossible story of his plans to take care of Mr. Hoddy’s daughter to Cyris Boggis engaging in outright fraud to get expensive antiques for a song to Rummins trying to hide the fact that the dead body of a missing local has been stashed away on his farm for months.

An interesting example occurs in “Parson’s Pleasure” in which crooked antiques dealer Boggis disguises himself as a parson to commit fraud. He devises a phony charitable organization called The Society for the Preservation of Rare Furniture as a ploy to get antiques a criminally undervalued price. His continual reference to the “Society” is ostensibly a metonymic term covering the entirety of this organization while in reality it is a term that signifies only himself.

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