While one can hardly complain when one has gone to a usually reliable source of entertainment and found it very much as you expected, the question will eventually arise as to when did the prepetrator eventually not be quite themselves any more- by being very much the same as they've ever been..
Alan Bennett has been a tremendous writer of plays, films, television, memoirs and fiction for longer than one of my age can quite remember. His masterpieces are many and he has more variety of style about him than any who immediately think of Thora Hird and afternoons eating macaroons might imagine. But there might come a time when we've all played the part of ourselves too long. It would be very harsh to make this allegation of Bennett quite yet but I have an inkling of it in these 'two unseemly stories'.
The theme is familiar in which the racy and, quite honestly, illicit is contrasted with the prim. Satire and/or gentle mocking is achieved on the fulcrum of an unlikely balance between the two. In the first story here, The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson, a widow's student lodgers find an innovative way to make up their rent arrears and Mrs. Donaldson's life seems to benefit from the distraction. You'd say it was unlikely but if you were to read some of the stories in the less edifying Sunday papers - which I admit I haven't for some decades- I'm sure more outlandish things happen. It is no less artfully written or realized by Bennett than one would hope but it wasn't quite 'classic' and one suspects he never got out of third gear in writing this one.
The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes is more successful, more contrived in its plot but openly admitting itself so. There are subterfuge, counter-espionage and layers of deceit as the intricacies of snobbery, money, lust and hypocrisy gather forces in a slightly more convincing tale.
For Graham's mother there was little to choose between Jews and Catholics. The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and Catholics had children in much the same way.
And, of course, Mrs. Forbes needs no shielding from the facts that nobody thinks she wouldn't be able to handle. She knew all the time as the story criss-crosses nearly all the possibilities in a denouement as beautiful as The Importance of Being Earnest.
Enjoyable but, possibly suffering from the immense expectations one has of its author, it is no better than it should be.
