Books: Confucian Wodehouse

THE RETURN OF KAI LUNG—Ernest Bramah—Sheridan House ($2.50).

“It is possible to escape from an enemy carrying a two-edged sword but not from the interference of a well-meaning woman.” Such Wodehousian sentiments garbed in Confucian terms are the unmistakable trade-mark of Ernest Bramah (E. B. Smith). His Kai Lung stories, which first began to appear 37 years ago and have been coming out at lengthy intervals ever since, have long delighted patient readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Their low-keyed humor, chess-game pace and subacid satire give them an effect somewhat less than sidesplitting, but for readers who like their slyness slow and stately, Ernest Bramah is a lordly dish. And The Return of Kai Lung shows that his salt has not lost its savor for being kept so long in the attic.

T’sin Wong, a mandarin of much potency and some parts, was considerably dismayed when he awoke one morning to find his pigtail gone. A hastily-convened assembly of wise men was not much help, passed the buck to a soothsayer. This worthy declared that within three days a mendicant would appear at the city gates who would make all clear. In due time the mendicant appeared, turned out to be a professional expresser of public apologies and an old drunk into the bargain. Luckily for himself he had with him his granddaughter, Hwa-che, who knew all about solving crimes from reading English detective stories. Hwa-che’s first few casts did credit to her training but instead of solving the mystery got herself and several other people into terrible trouble. How everything was enabled to come so deliciously right in the end is the professional secret of Author Bramah.

Though Bramah characters are, almost invariably, excruciatingly polite no matter what their feelings, they occasionally break into such plain-&-fancy cussing as “Thou concave-eyed and mentally bed-ridden offspring of a bald-seated she-dog!” Their chief delight, however, is in apt aphorisms: ”Two resolute men acting in concord may transform an Empire, but an ordinarily resourceful duck can escape from a dissentient rabble”; “To regard all men as corrupt is wise, but to attempt to discriminate among their various degrees of iniquity is both foolish and discourteous.”