TOPICAL BURLESQUE

Evening Star, Issue 23687, 21 September 1940, Page 4

TOPICAL BURLESQUE

“ Returning to his office at the Ministry of Elimination, Sir Humphrey Spratt was annoyed to find his swivel chair occupied by a stranger, a bearded stranger. To make it worse, the johnny was dead. He had no right to be there in the first place.” That is how ‘ Envoy on Excursion ' —authprs, Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon—begins, and this clever and extremely amusing burlesque of the activities and inactivities, of diplomats and other Government “ heads' ” during wartime, goes on to tell of the effects of the mysterious death of this mysterious envoy from Insomnia, where gardenium comes from and where King Hannibal ( the Hothead rules his unfriendly; cabinet. This gardenium, a substance of whica nobody appears to know anything about, but yet is regarded as being essential to the winning of the war, is sought by Britain and Germany, and most of "the fun revolves around the adventures of Mr Stung, the British envoy, Mr Quill, the journalist who accompanies him and who escapes assassination because the time bomb proves ersatz, Sasha Podushkin, the eternally, sleepy and unwilling Insomnia envoy, Herr von Papen, who is always starting for somewhere and never reaching , there, Canterbury Brindle, novelist, correspondent, and “ the man wha knows,” A 1 Sohenk, the adventurer from U.S.A., and many others. Goering, Goebbels, Lord Haw-Haw, and even the Fuhrer and ‘ Mon Kamph ’ hover in the offing also. The book is full of explosive (laughter) bombs, and none of them is of the “.delayed action ” type;) that is why ‘ Envoy on Excursion is burlesque rather than satire. But it is rich and topical. Our copy is from Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.