Funny Business: Examples of Humour in the Novels of Nigel Balchin

Nigel Balchin established himself as a writer in the mid-1930s by penning comic pieces for magazines such as Punch and The Aeroplane and by producing two books under the pseudonym Mark Spade that satirized his work as an industrial psychologist: How to Run a Bassoon Factory and Business for Pleasure. The former book gave rise to deliciously pithy definitions of a foreman as “a man who does not think it can be done” and of a Managing Director as “a man who really knows where the factory is, and even goes there sometimes”. These tyro attempts at humour all struck more or less the same note, being light, whimsical and playfully flippant. Around the same time, Balchin wrote one comic novel (1936’s Lightbody on Liberty) but it wasn’t especially funny and was badly overshadowed by contemporary works by more skilful humorists such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Thereafter, with the exception of a small handful of magazine articles and his bizarre 1947 play-cum-novel Lord, I Was Afraid, Balchin turned his back on trying to write comedy and directed his attention towards something more serious. However, almost all of his later novels are periodically enlivened by shards of razor-sharp wit.

With Darkness Falls From the Air in 1942, Balchin showcased the very different sort of humour that would henceforth be his stock in trade. Out went flippancy, gentle whimsy and flights of fancy, replaced by a much darker set of comic weapons: sarcasm, satire, cynicism and irony. Bill Sarratt’s loathing of both his colleagues and his job constitutes a fine example of Balchin’s deployment of biting humour. Witness Sarratt musing on the possible repercussions of an air raid on his workplace:

As I got near the office I suddenly wondered what would happen if they’d written the place off in the night. I thought it might be quite a good thing if they had. Then we could start again. But they’d need to do it in daylight, so as to get most of the staff, if it was going to be any good.

And here he is talking to an acquaintance who is desperate to find a job in case he gets conscripted:

You couldn’t get me in to your Ministry, I suppose? I’ve only got about a month to get fixed.’

I said, ‘Why should I? You’ve never done me any harm.’

Sarratt’s contempt for those who are not pulling their weight in the War (roughly speaking, all those who appear to be having a better time of it than he is) finds its ultimate expression when he and a friend observe an aristocratic character sheltering at night in a Tube station:

He was sitting in a very expensive-looking Dunlopillo sleeping-bag, dressed in a camel hair dressing-gown, playing Archer patience. He had a silver and leather flask beside him, and as we looked he stopped playing patience for a moment and took a meditative pull at this flask while he thought it out.

Ted said, ‘I suppose his valet comes and calls him in the morning.’

And brings his shaving water,’ I said. ‘War’s a terrible thing.’

The Small Back Room, Balchin’s 1943 follow-up to Darkness Falls From the Air, is another novel littered with vituperative wit. One of the funniest scenes occurs early on in the book, when a self-regarding Cabinet Minister (brilliantly impersonated by Robert Morley in the movie version) comes to inspect the work of Professor Mair’s research section and clearly wishes he were somewhere else:

He looked round and said, “Well, there’s certainly a lot of most interesting work going on here, Mair. Most interesting.” Just to show how fascinated he was he started for the door.

More amusement results when Mair is replaced by Brine as head of the research section and the new man unveils his own ideas of what the back-room boys should be doing:

First of all, the effect of hydrogen ion concentration in quenching fluids in the hardening of molybdenum and tungsten steels.”

He looked up, with the air of a man who’d given us a present.

How about that one?”

Tilly sat up with such a jerk that his glasses nearly came off. I’d never seen him look so startled in his life. He just stared at Brine like a cod fish and didn’t say anything.

Not an easy one, is it?” said Brine smiling. He seemed to imagine that Tilly was busy thinking it out.

Tilly shook his head. “Far from it, sir,” he said respectfully. I didn’t suppose for a moment that he knew what hydrogen ion concentration meant.

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for instance, is one that could well crop up in a sitcom even today. Here the researchers are discussing the possible military advantages of poisoned barbed wire:

What’s the poison?” I said, “Curare?”

Oh, he doesn’t go into that,” said Joe. “He says he isn’t a scientist himself. He just has ideas.”

If I had ideas like that I’d see a doctor,” I said.

Like Bill Sarratt, the psycho-analyst Felix Milne is another Balchin protagonist who does not suffer fools gladly. In Mine Own Executioner (1945) he meets a fellow passenger in the Underground who requires his help:

A fat elderly woman in a fur coat leaned towards him and said, “Would you mind telling me when we get to Victoria?”

He smiled agreeably and nodded and went on smiling mechanically into vacancy.

The train slowed down. Every few yards there was a sign saying “Victoria” in large letters. Porters bawled “Victoria.” The elderly woman went to the door and said to another passenger, “Is this Victoria?” She got out, casting an angry backward glance at Milne. He smiled and bowed to her.

But Felix soon meets his match at the inquest into his treatment of the schizophrenic Adam Lucian. The coroner is possessed of an hilariously abrasive manner, is no respecter of reputations and aims a number of barbs at Milne, as witnessed by his account of the psycho-analyst trying to talk Lucian down from the high building:

All you know is that Mr. Milne went up to make him see reason and he promptly shot himself.”

Amidst the violence, chicanery and political machinations that characterize The Borgia Testament (1948), Balchin’s historical novel also contains a respectable smattering of lighter moments. At one point in the narrative, a chimney in the Vatican falls through the roof during a violent storm. A heavy beam is brought down, almost killing Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. Here, Borgia’s son Cesare discusses the incident with Burchard, the Pope’s Master of Ceremonies:

I said, “It really was a lucky escape, wasn’t it?”

Burchard said solemnly, “It was a miracle. God put forth His hand and delivered His vicar.”

Well, as He’d put forth His hand and pushed the roof in, that was only fair.”

On another occasion, Cesare and his father discuss a change in the hair colour of Cesare’s sister, Lucrezia:

Why do you wear yellow hair? I thought only whores did that.”

She said, “Don’t you like it, my lord? Every woman in Rome’s wearing it.”

My father chuckled and said, “That doesn’t alter Cesare’s point.”

Balchin’s 1949 scientific thriller A Sort of Traitors contains one of the author’s best minor characters in the shape of Mr. Prince, the outwardly bumbling security man who is in fact far shrewder than he looks. Prince comes complete with both his own set of catchphrases (such as “We were told there wasn’t to be any trouble” and “You never know anything on these jobs”) and an engaging line in self-deprecating humour:

Now, as you both know, some time back we were told to keep an eye on the Haughton Laboratory. It was one of these ‘no trouble’ jobs. We weren’t to do anything, of course. We were just to see that nothing leaked from a place which wasn’t under proper security control, which was part of another building, which might be open all hours of the day and night—and so on. Just one of those little jobs that make us go away and shoot ourselves.”

Prince neatly sums up the Catch-22 nature of the ‘no trouble’ job he is forced to tackle:

They expect you to stop a man from doing something, but they won’t let you touch him before he does it. Then they say you’re slow.”

Finally, here is an extract from A Way Through the Wood (1951) featuring Bill Bule, a totally irresponsible toff who supplies most of the levity in what is otherwise quite a sombre novel. In this brilliantly inventive scene, one of my favourites in the whole of the Balchin canon, Bule and the Mannings are in Paris towards the end of an enjoyable night out:

Bule had a line of completely solemn fantastic behaviour that was very funny—at least it seemed funny then. I remember that as we came out of one place he said, “Ah—a horseless carriage—one moment,” and went up to a cab, and asked the driver to go to the Moulin Rouge. I was surprised, because I shouldn’t have thought that we wanted to go to the Moulin Rouge, but Bule had started an argument with the driver about what the fare would be. This went on for a long time, but at last they came to terms, and Bule pulled out his wallet and gave him the fare. The driver started his engine and waited, whereupon Bule said, “All right—off you go.” The driver looked rather puzzled and said, “Aren’t you coming?” and Bule said in a surprised way, “What, us? Why should we want to go to that place? Toddle along now.” The driver hesitated for a bit and thought it over, and then shrugged his shoulders and actually started off. I have often wondered since how far he went.

This has been just a quick tiptoe through some of the funnier moments to be found in Nigel Balchin’s fiction. There are many more that I didn’t have the space to include but perhaps this brief survey will encourage you to dip into his novels yourself in search of further examples.

© Derek Collett 2011