Places: The Unbearable Bassington

Bassington Unbearable Bassington, Thehouse. London home of Francesca Bassington, whose house is hers only until Emmeline Chetrof marries. Thus, it is not truly a home, and its very impermanence drives Francesca’s actions and suggests the shallowness of the society in which she lives. Francesca’s only visitors seem to be her son and her brother–one more indication that the house will disappear. The furnishings that Francesca prizes she has acquired mostly by chance; her “delicious bronze Fremiet” she buys with winnings from horse racing; some Dresden figurines are given to her by an admirer; other Dresden figurines she acquires with bridge winnings. There are other things she values, in part because they come from marvelous, mysterious places, but above all because they are somehow connected with her own history. Her prize possession, the “Van der Meulen” painting, turns out to be a fake.

*London. Great Britain’s chief city, in which almost all the action in the novel takes place. The people inhabiting Saki’s London are strictly upper middle class, with an occasional member of the lower aristocracy. Francesca plays bridge with her female friends at various houses, especially Serena Golackly’s, all of which are clearly in the West End of London, where the upper classes live. Besides bridge, the main purpose of these parties is gossip, of a petty and nasty sort.

Elaine’s garden-park. Place where Elaine entertains both Comus and Youghal. With its roses, “emerald turf,” and brilliantly plumed pheasants, the park functions as a kind of Garden of Eden. All should be well. But Comus foolishly shows himself at his worst, just when he should be at his best, a small, self-destructive, selfish Adam who demands that Elaine give him a silver bread-and-butter dish which is a family heirloom.

Keriway farm. Place outside London where Elaine pays an accidental visit to Tom Keriway. The farm presents the ambiguities of the natural world against those of the city world. Keriway, too, has an Eden, and Elaine believes it is a real Eden. However, he himself points out its violence and, at the same time, its dullness. Like virtually all the places in the novel, the farm, too, disappoints.

African colony. Unnamed tropical British colony where Comus is sent and dies. With all its faults, the colony appears to be somehow superior to the superficial English world of the rest of the novel, though Saki is not making a clear anticolonial statement. At the same time, Africa is hot, humid, and dangerous–the very opposite of the well-furnished, comfortable houses of upper-middle-class life back in England. However, it is also the only place in the novel containing people of other races and other classes. Comus Bassington sees and envies the African children at play, something he would have hardly noticed back home. Indeed, the only glimpse of children in England is at the public school that the young Comus attends and at which casual cruelty is the ruling principle. Human violence and emptiness is not the point here. The finally irony is that Comus does not fit in–and that this place will kill him.