I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over
at My
Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read
books that you already own.
From London Far
a.k.a. The Unsuspected Chasm –
Michael Innes
Richard Meredith is a middle-aged classics professor who
specializes in Martial and Juvenal. As an absentminded intellectual (is that
redundant?), he finds himself in his tobacconist’s shop and mutters a phrase
from Dr. Johnson’s London, a Poem.
He is surprised when the clerk opens a trap-door and ushers him down into the
depths of London. He comes upon scores of art masterpieces. Against the
smugglers of looted art, he finds an ally in Jean Halliwell, a young scholar in
archeology with a specialty in Minoan weapons. In an exciting if far-fetched
scene, they and two bloodhounds escape being put in a sack and dropped into the
Channel by fleeing across the rooftops of London.
They proceed to have adventures that are so zany as to
lead us readers to think that John Buchan’s rousers like Greenmantle are being parodied. As usual, the villains are bizarre.
For example, one is an eccentric rich guy – with the typically American name of
Otis K. Neff – that will call to mind the unhinged oil millionaire Jo Stoyte in
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by
Aldous Huxley.
Also as usual, there are plenty of erudite laughs:
Mrs Cameron was given to
religious enthusiasm and so, in Jean’s view, was on the thither side of sanity
also.
The man was … simultaneously
enjoying the remains of a cigar and a thoughtful study of the girl’s knees.
Habit apart, there seemed to be no reason why he should not study the superincumbent
parts of her anatomy as well, for the girl was stripped for bathing to a degree
which Meredith could not at all approve.
At 300 pages, some snipping in the middle and near the
end would have been in order. But members of the thinking audience – i.e., us
avid readers -- will be able to pat themselves on the back for understanding
allusions to The Perfumed Garden and
knowing already what pygmalionism is.
It’s not, however, merely learned yuks. Innes describes
rural Scotland and its remote fastnesses so vividly we wish we could visit
Caledonia someday. He makes wise observations of religion in Scotland, art
appreciation, and the mentality of collecting. Published in 1946, it also
touches on the heavy subject of Europe pulling itself together after the most
destructive war in history.
I think that Innes had a middle-aged, middle-class,
educated and bookish target audience in mind. However, he always portrays his
female characters with lots of smarts and capacity for action. Against stereotype,
Jean Halliwell combines dedication to fighting evil-doers with a zest for adventure.
There’s a wonderful parody of academic disputation near the end when Jean incisively
supports her position in an argument where she and Meredith are trying to
account for the art collecting mania of Otis K. Neff.
Michael Innes was the pen name of J.I.M Stewart (1906 –
1994), an English prof in the UK, Ireland, and Australia until his retirement
in 1973, after which he wrote mysteries full-time until about 1985. Most of his
mysteries starred Sir John
Appleby, a Scotland Yard Detective Inspector. But many of his books are
independent novels like this one and Lament for
a Maker.
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