The Eliza Stories
Barry Pain
347 pages
published between 1900 and 1913

One of the things I like about Sandra is her taste in fiction. It overlaps my own. For instance, we both like fantasy and science fiction for example, though I read a lot more of it then she does. Of course, there are also writers and genres she likes and I don't and vice versa. She's partial to modern murder stories (Ian Rankin, James Lee Burke et all) which genre I'm usually bored by, while I on the other hand like a Georgette Heyer regency romance, which she can't stand. On the whole however, if she recommends a book to me there's a great possibility that I will enjoy it.

Such was also the case with this book, which is a collection of five humourous novels about the domestic travails of long suffering but patient Eliza and her bore of a husband. It fits in the same small genre in which you can also find Diary of a Nobody and Diary of a Provincial Lady All these books offer a humouristic look at everyday life of a middleclass family, in the form of a diary kept by either the lady or the master of the house. Often, the diarist is mocked in their own diary without noticing, as is the case here.

The diary you see, is kept by Eliza's nameless husband, though she herself is clearly the heroine of the stories. She loves her husband, is patient with him, but she is not afraid to mock him when he deserves to. Which he does frequently. By jove, he's a pompous insufferable, dimwitted, self absorbed, self righteous berk. Within fifteen to twenty pages you're ready to strangle him. His only redeeming feature is that he's just too naive, too simpleminded in some respects to be a real villain.

Of course, it's exactly because he's a pompous, stubborn so-and-so that he gets into trouble. Because he refuses to take advice from eliza, he cannot do as much as hang up a simple painting without it leading to a small catastrophe. He is in fact, Basil Fawlty's spiritual ancestor, with Eliza playing the role of Basil's wife, though Eliza is far less annoying. And like Fawlty, you slowly see that behind his oafishness there is a good man hiding. After all, there must have been a reason Eliza married him, right? The best view of what for man he really is in the last book in the series, which is narrated by their son, when it's those latter features that shine through and the habits for which you first wanted to strangle him now seem somewhat pathetic.

Apart from all that, the stories are also very funny of themselves. They're written as classic comedies, where the hubris of the main character is brought to a fall by his own flaws. When he gets carried away with his new hobby of photography, he falls for a swindle by a professional cheat who relieves him of his equipment, only because he's vain enough to actually believe he could be a professional photographer. I'm thankful Sandra pointed this book out to me; it's a hilarious read and I would've never found it on my own.