Blessed Plot

London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.. Very Good+ in Very Good- dj. 1946. First Edition. Hardcover. [a bit of soiling at top/bottom edges, minor shelfwear; jacket worn at corners, torn/wrinkled at lower right front panel, back panel soiled, chipping & a little paper loss at both ends of spine]. "A comedy of our times," sez the jacket blurb. "Aubrey Beardsley Mafeking Potts, in the Spring of 1944, feels that his self-chosen war task as Director of Army Morale Building is concluded, and not unsuccessfully. What next? [His] final choice falls on the creation of a new town. He brings in his friend Lord Llanfair, who in his turn introduces his nephew Llewellyn, formerly a sergeant in Maritime A.A., but now discharged minus one arm. The site they select is the ancestral home of the Earl of Tangier, but since this estate was bought for the first earl with public money it can only be sold with parliamentary sanction, and the inevitable Private Bill becomes a political football, as well as being nearly frustrated by the Ministry of Planning Co-ordination. The Bill edges its way through law, planning combines, newspapers, Parliament and the Civil Service, and finally dominates an astounding by-election in Wales." A real knee-slapper,and unquestionably the finest example of that much-maligned (not to say totally ignored) literary sub-sub-genre, the postwar Hertfordshire legislative satire. The first novel by the author of "Credit Buying" and "No Depression in Iceland"; might have made a great Ealing comedy! .