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H. E. Bates was born in Northamptonshire in 1905. He published his first novel, The Two Sisters, when he was twenty, and for the next decade built up a reputation as a writer of great versatility. During the Second World War Bates was commissioned by the RAF as a short story writer, where he wrote the acclaimed How Sleep the Brave and The Greatest People in the World. His most popular creation was the effervescent Larkin family about whom he wrote five novels including The Darling Buds of May and A Little of What You Fancy. In 1973 H. E. Bates was awarded the C.B.E. He died in 1974.
Published in England in 1939, but never before in the US, these 14 small tales offer sly, affectionate glimpses of the narrator's great-uncle Silas - a rural oldster of the earthy, boozy, incorrigible school. In a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, 93-year-old Silas recalls his more youthful days of poaching and wooing. In The Revelation, the narrator watches old Silas being given a bath by his surly, longtime housekeeper - and realizes for the first time that their relationship is (or at least Once was) intensely romantic. Elsewhere, Silas chortles over tall-tales of his Casanova days, trying to out-lie his dandyish, equally ancient brother-in-law Cosmo. (In one anecdote, Silas hides from a jealous husband in a cellar for days, eating stewed nails to keep from starving to death.) There are nostalgic vignettes of roof-thatching, pig-wrestling, and grave-digging - plus, in A Happy Man, a somewhat more serious sketch of Silas' old chum Walter, an outwardly cheerful ex-soldier who eventually succumbs (with traumatic memories of 1880s Asian campaigns) to madness. And, inevitably, The Death of Uncle Silas arrives at the close - though, even on his deathbed, Silas is sneaking snorts of wine . . . while, in an epilogue, the narrator shows that he's inherited a wee bit of his great-uncle's mischief. Modestly amusing, with lyrical/wistful touches to soften the near-buffoonery: minor but attractive work from novelist/storyteller Bates (19051974), best known in recent years as the source of the PBS series Love for Lydia. (Kirkus Reviews)
