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Overview
Alan Bennett’s extraordinary ear for dialogue and sharpness of perception have made him a master storyteller. In “Father! Father! Burning Bright” he writes with tragicomic insight about a son’s vigil at his father’s deathbed where their lifelong battle continues to the end. “The Laying on of Hands,” a brilliantly funny satire, describes a society memorial service for a rather special masseur who died tragically young; and in “Miss Fozzard Finds her Feet,” a lonely, unmarried department store clerk discovers there’s more to life than looking after her brother through her only indulgence, her podiatrist.
Synopsis
Alan Bennett’s extraordinary ear for dialogue and sharpness of perception have made him a master storyteller. In “Father! Father! Burning Bright” he writes with tragicomic insight about a son’s vigil at his father’s deathbed where their lifelong battle continues to the end. “The Laying on of Hands,” a brilliantly funny satire, describes a society memorial service for a rather special masseur who died tragically young; and in “Miss Fozzard Finds her Feet,” a lonely, unmarried department store clerk discovers there’s more to life than looking after her brother through her only indulgence, her podiatrist.
New Yorker
A celebrity-studded High Church funeral for a gifted masseur with (it turns out) catholic tastes; a lovelorn spinster who finds fulfillment at the hands of a podiatrist; and a hen-pecked husband at the bedside of his interminably dying father are the subjects of these three very funny stories by the British playwright. Bennett's genius is for the imploding situation in which a cleverly made house of cards shudders and comes down; the comments of his characters as they nimbly pick their way around the wreckage ("I suppose there's a word for what I'm doing," the spinster says, "but . . . I skirt around it") verge on aphorism.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“Bennett’s genius is his ability to satirize humanely. [His] prose is like stained glass: if you stare at it, you see things you missed...brilliant and luminous.” —The New York Times Book Review“Bennett’s genius is for the imploding situation in which a cleverly made house of cards shudders and comes down; the comments of his characters as they nimbly pick their way around the wreckage verge on aphorism.” —The New Yorker
“In the hands of Alan Bennett, the tragic and painful are close bedfellows with the funny and the sexual, making for a collection of stories, in which we laugh at the situations presented and then feel a twinge of guilt.” —Los Angeles Times