The Londoners: An Absurdity

Robert Hichens turns his piercing gaze on London's haute bourgeoisie in this delectable 1898 satire, where the absurdity of English upper-class life gleams with uncomfortable clarity. Mrs. Verulam, draped in pale-pink tea-gown and embroidered ennui, drifts through her drawing-room on a sweltering May afternoon, clutching invitation cards she despises yet cannot refuse. She longs to escape the suffocating rituals of society, the endless dances and dinners that amount to nothing. Then arrives Mrs. Van Adam, recently divorced and desperate to do precisely what her hostess abhors: climb into the very world Mrs. Verulam spurns. The collision of these two women's desires one wanting out, one wanting in creates a delicious machinery of irony. Hichens, who had previously skewered Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in "The Green Carnation," here applies his wit to the entire edifice of Victorian respectability, revealing its empty ceremonies and desperate performances. The heat wave that opens the book, killing a premature old general of "tropical apoplexy," casts the whole society as something overheated, overripe, nearly dopey in its conventions. It's a sharp, funny, quietly vicious portrait of people mistaking noise for meaning.