Upon receiving an invitation to address the Women’s Institute in the remote village of Upper Bottom, Richard Dawkins, “the greatest philosopher-scientist of his age”, immediately sets off to enlighten its benighted inhabitants. But when Dawkins and his male secretary, Smee, are held up by a snowstorm en route, they are forced to take refuge with a mild-mannered ex-vicar and his wife, with hilarious consequences. Between delivering kittens and turning on the Christmas lights, the stranded professor gamely persists in trying to convert his captive audience to humanism, launching into Swiftian discourses on infanticide and cannibalism at every opportunity, to the growing disquiet of Smee.
Rhodes’s novel is gleefully irreverent, with a ribald wit and a truculent disregard for the legal niceties that caused it to remain unpublished for several years. There are, of course, a number of twists, all of which are delivered with very English eccentricity.
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