THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘Start a Saki story and you will finish it. Finish one and you will start another, and having finished them you will never forget them. They remain an addiction because they are much more than funny’
TOM SHARPE

Cats who learn to talk (to the discomfiture of their owners), bad-tempered aunts who get stuck in water tanks and the world’s most disgusting breakfast cereal, ‘Filboid Studge’, are just some of the fantastical inventions that populate the stories of Saki, the pen-name of H. H. Munro.

Saki had the ability to combine fresh comedy with a biting satire that makes his stories occasionally unsettling and always arresting. For all their humour, there is a serious undercurrent to his work. The severity of his own upbringing in the care of his aunts is reflected in stories like ‘Sredni Vashtar’, where a child invents a religion in honour of the eponymous polecat-ferret; a vengeful, merciless god to rebel against his aunt’s tyranny. Adults may appear to hold all the power, but are crucially unable to control the imagination, which allows us to laugh in the midst of trouble, find a window of escape, counteract society’s hypocrisy. As shown by stories like ‘The Penance’, where an adult agrees to a strange ritual devised by three children to make up for killing their cat, there is even an opportunity to redeem our all-too-human natures.

Although he wrote two novels, a history of Russia and was a prolific journalist, Saki is best remembered for these economical and witty short stories. The youthful idlers of Edwardian country-house parties he depicts remind the reader that Munro was writing during the comic heyday of P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. Seldom more than five pages long, these 49 stories perfectly illustrate the aphorism that brevity is the soul of wit.