Word: rumpelstiltskin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...days of shopping for items that range from electrified fences and worm medicine to a $200 "rocking sheep" covered in natural fleece. Wolfing down golf-ball-size chunks of fresh lamb barbecue (at $3.50 a plate), they watch as skilled artisans turn piles of fleece into yarn with Rumpelstiltskin-like skill. After hours spent looking over the thickset Dorsets and Suffolks, fine-haired Merinos, goatish Barbado black bellies and exotic Karakuls on display, people whose only past experience with sheep also involved mint jelly begin to make knowing comments about various breeds...
...many genes busily at work, all would seem to be well with the author's warm-weather fiction. But Novelist Weldon is much too fond of the kind of ornateness that clutters Iris Murdoch's lesser novels-in this case, the ponderous idea that Hamish is Rumpelstiltskin and Elsa is the poor girl for whom he spins straw into gold. Gemma insists that Elsa do huge batches of typing each night. Elsa can't manage it, but Hamish...
Straw into gold-but what's the point? The remainder of the fairy tale requires that the girl guess Rumpelstiltskin's name or give up her first-born child to him, and sure enough, Hamish's origins are unknown, at least to Elsa and the reader. Gemma ultimately reveals her husband's identity at the end of an amusing but overlong story of her introduction...
...time, though, the reader entertains the ghastly suspicion that the author has distorted her comedy in order to convey some symbolic code message. Not at all; the novel hasn't an idea in its head, and rightly so. If the Rumpelstiltskin business had been chucked out with Weldon's first draft, her account of Elsa's undoing could have scaled the foothills of superior nonsense...
...Duck? divides a genre into four cavorters: Zeppo, once charitably labeled the Good Looking One; Harpo, Rumpelstiltskin with mild satyriasis; Chico, the Italian Defamation League; and the great, nay immoral Groucho. Under his pun-fulfilled guidance the boys carom delightfully from the primitive surrealism of The Cocoanuts on beyond that neglected antiwar pageant Duck Soup, to the classic double bill, A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera...