Modern Classics Mapp and Lucia

Oover the last fifteen years I have been meaning to read certain authors. H.E. Bates, Anthony Trollope, P.G. Wodehouse, E.F. Benson and the like. Last week I succumbed to a nasty bout of influenza and E.F. Benson. I had grabbed the slender volume of "Mapp & Lucia" from the library shelf and it had rested in my bookcase for almost a week. Not wanting to dull my brain with endless hours of television, I cracked open "Mapp & Lucia".Ten pages into the book and I was hooked. Lucia, her period of mourning almost over is looking to regain her iron control on her hometown. First action, regain her star role as Queen Elizabeth in the village fete.As I read Lucia's plots and plans, a strange thought hit me. Lucia is the creature Hyacinth Bucket (the main character of the BBC's Keeping Up Appearances) secretly dreams of being. Having taken over the fete from her dazed and confused friend, Lucia goes onto greater pastures, the hometown of Miss Elizabeth Mapp, reigning social goddesss.Miss Elizabeth Mapp (known as Mapp) plots with her friends to rent out their respective homes a profit. Lucia and her best friend (a gentleman who brings to mind a cross between KUA's Richard and AYBS Mr Humphries) move and slowly begin to take over the town. Mapp is not pleased and a genteel war of one-upsmanship begins between the two ladies. Drawings are rejected from the art exhibit, parties given, ownership of produce and fruit desputed with the poor town in the middle. Matters come to a head on Boxing Day (December 26) when Mapp decides to steal a longed for recipe that Lucia refuses to give to her. Lucia stumbles on her rival in the kitchen and both women are swept out to sea on Lucia's kitchen table (yes, Lucia's kitchen table, this is a not a mis-type). The town mourns the two ladies as lost and the Great War of Mapp-Lucia as over.Okay, enough said. You'll have to succumb to the collective charms of the ladies Mapp and Lucia yourself and find out all the bits I've left out. Now, I'm off hunt down and read the rest of E.F. Benson's wonderful books.

Ten years ago a friend suggested that if I were short of reading material I could do no better than to pick up a copy of 'Queen Lucia' - the first in a series of six 'Lucia' books. I ignored his advice but, fortunately for me, several months ago I experienced an attack of extremely good sense, bought the first book and have never looked back. 'Mapp and Lucia' (PLEASE read the three books preceding this one!!) will introduce you to the most disagreeable, ridiculous, shallow, narrow-minded, scheming, snobbish, frightful, venomous, adorable group of middle-class English ladies (not forgetting Mr Georgie Pilson) that you are EVER likely to meet. Every chapter oozes poison and I lapped it up. At the end of 'Trouble For Lucia' - the sixth and final book - it was most painful having to say 'au reservoir' to all my delightful new friends in Tilling. 'Mapp and Lucia' is arguably the best of the six but...it'll be so much fun making your own mind up!

Enough cannot be said about the merit of this and all other Lucia novels. They are the very apotheosis of English humorous writing. The machinations by which Lucia inevitably achieves her ends make vastly amusing reading. You will reach the end of this novel having learned nothing. It will not improve you. The characters will not grow into better, more mature, more enlightened beings than they were at the start of this all too short gem of a book. Despite these facts (all "serious" readers will deride and condemn) there has been nothing like these exemplary novels for pure entertainment, and I, for one, still believe this is an admirable reason for opening a book at any time. Do try it.

If ever 21st Century life gets a little 'tarsome' (as Lucia's stalwart escort, 'Georgie', would put it), I turn time and time again to the little village of Tilling, East Sussex, where E.F Benson has created his 'world' of tea shops, dinner parties, amateur art societies and, most importantly, PEOPLE - for it is within the realms of PEOPLE and their most hateful foibles that Benson's genius lay. The autocratic 'Lucia' and her arch rival, the dastardly 'Miss Mapp', battle it out over a series of rich and wonderful books, and there is not a page which does not have me crying tears of laughter into my cucumber sandwhiches and India tea! Marvellous escapism and unbelievably suspensful (WHAT'S going to happen when Georgie and Mr Wyse BOTH wear their new velvet suits to Lucia's dinner party! ), Benson turns his caustic, playful eye on British society of the 1920s with such pure delight that there is only one word for these books; DELICIOUS!