I should start calling these ‘Play Reviews’ and not Book Reviews’ as this is my second one for a play and considering the total is now four, that’s a good half and half. Today then it’s The Brass Butterfly by William Golding. I have previous with William Golding as I recently attempted to read his third novel Pincher Martin; about a sole survivor of a torpedoed naval vessel. He washes ashore on an island and seemingly expresses every thought ever made; which may have been a wonderful recounting of a mans mind in an extreme and desperate moment of survival but seemed far too descriptive and hard to follow that I gave up on chapter three unsure of what was going on. He did though win the Nobel Prize for literature so it could be more about my ability to read than his ability to write. Having written Lord Of The Flies, which is easily his most famous and successful novel and far more accessible than Pincher Martin, an inability to grasp his third novel may be my loss over his.
The Brass Butterfly though is the only play of his I have read and I enjoyed it. It’s a comedy, and it’s quite an easy simple one at that. Set in the Third Century AD the story follows an Emperor, his grandson, his General and heir apparent, an inventor and the inventors sister. It follows a common theme of idiots with power and an inventor trying to achieve things despite them. While he comes up with pressure from steam, and therefore a ship faster than any other, as well as a pressure bomb that can be thrown from a catapult like a grenade, the Emperor is only interested in the possibilities of experiencing a pressure cooker and the food it can produce. Eventually the sister saves the day and at the end it turns out the old Emperor is far wiser than appears throughout the story. There were times I thought of Astrix, but that is probably only because the General is called Postumus. And times the story reminded me of a Tom Sharpe novel but without the sex and nudity. It was written in 1958 and there was something of that time in the humour, hence the Tom Sharpe connection in my mind. I can imagine my father enjoying the story.
Ultimately a simply and easy play. They don’t all have to be intense and painful to experience. I shall leave you though with a quote from the Emperor which had little to do with the storyline but is worth repeating;
“You work among perfect elements, and therefore politically you are an idealist. There will always be slaves, though the name may change. What is slavery but the domination of the weak by the strong? How can you make them equal? Or are you fool enough to believe we are born equal?”
Observations and Misunderstandings 