Wilfred Toadflax’s surprise birthday is a picnic feast of cakes, pies, jellies, and fruits. It’s the kind of high-carb meal that makes your teeth hurt. Mr. Apple’s grace suggests that the food is local, but not as he suggests from “our green...
Colgate’s The Shooting Party is a snapshot of English gentry circa October 1913 when Sir Randolph and Minnie Nettleby, the lord and lady of the manor, host one of their traditional fall shooting parties. A halt accompanies it on the hunt or midday break for luncheon....
Bridges’s hunt picnic is faithful to Isabel Colegate’s gently melancholy novel of English gentry circa 1913, The Shooting Party. The title The Shooting Party is intended to suggest the larger “shooting party” of the looming world war. Though they know it, Sir...
Picnic is the euphemism for a daylong eating orgy in Gordon’s Wilberforce Goes on a Picnic (1982). It’s the story of obese bears and a goat, who collectively devour mounds of hamburgers on rolls, sandwiches, a jar of catsup, a bowl heaped with mashed...
Sturridge’s strawberry picnic in Brideshead Revisited is mainly faithful to Waugh’s novel. Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder’s idyllic picnic and intensely close friendship is a moment of respite in their otherwise often messy lives. Particularly Sebastian’s....
Marquand’s The Eye of the Needle is close enough to Follett’s spy thriller, which does not have a picnic episode. Henry Faber, aka Henry Baker, aka The Needle, waits to connect with a Nazi U-boat to take him back to Germany to meet with Hitler. He’s...
Transforming the popular children’s song “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” into a death picnic is Trevor’s metaphor for portraying the 1980s generation as infantile and short on morality. Six months into their marriage, Edwin, a twenty-nine-year-old...
Colwin’s is a New York-based novel about Polly [Dora] Solo-Miller Demarest, married to Henry Demarest, an affluent, Jewish East Manhattan husband she loves, and Lincoln Bennett, an artist who lives in Lower Manhattan. Polly finds family happiness by leading two lives,...
At Byrum’s July Fourth picnic, lovers cuddle, kiss, and roll on the grass. Larry Darrell wants more, but Isabel Bradley wants to wait. At the lover’s picnic in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, never touch or kiss or even hold hands As in...
The Marabar Caves picnic is a metaphor for the irreconcilability of Anglo-Indian relationships. Lean’s careful version of the catastrophic “Caves” episode, like Forster’s, constitutes the middle third of A Passage to India. Dr. Aziz’s...
