Twenty-one minutes. That's all Saki needs to demolish every polite fiction that holds civilized society together.
I was waiting for Denise outside her dentist's office - one of those fluorescent-lit waiting rooms with magazines from 2019 - and figured I'd knock out something short. "Tobermory" has been on my list for years. I teach Saki's "The Open Window" to my sophomores every fall, and they love the cruelty of it, that teenage delight in watching adults get humiliated. But I'd never actually sat with "Tobermory" properly. Twenty-one minutes later, I was laughing in a waiting room full of strangers, and the receptionist gave me a look.
A Cat With the Manners of a Gossip Columnist
Here's the setup, and it's deceptively simple: a man named Cornelius Appin announces at a weekend house party that he's taught the cat to speak English. Nobody believes him. Then the cat walks in and starts talking. And what does Tobermory talk about? Not philosophy. Not the meaning of life. He talks about what he's seen. Through bedroom windows. Behind closed doors. The affairs, the lies, the petty jealousies that every guest at this country house has been carefully concealing from every other guest.
What kills me - what I tried explaining to Denise in the car afterward - is that Saki understood something about social dynamics that most novelists need 400 pages to get at. The horror isn't the talking cat. The horror is the transparency. The instant Tobermory can report what he's observed, every single person in that drawing room becomes a threat to every other person. The veneer cracks in about three sentences. Lady Blemley's composure, Mrs. Cornett's pointed questions about what the cat saw at her window, Sir Wilfrid asking about his reputation at the stables - each guest stops caring about the miracle of a speaking animal and starts panicking about their own exposure. The slow unraveling of respectable people under unbearable pressure is something Power of the Dog also does brilliantly, though it takes considerably more than twenty-one minutes to detonate.
This is why we still read the classics. Because Saki wrote this in 1911 and it's basically a perfect metaphor for the internet.
Michael Scott and the Problem of a 21-Minute Performance
Let's talk about the narration honestly, because I don't have a ton to work with here. At twenty-one minutes, this is barely longer than one of my podcast episodes (and considerably better produced - sorry to my 47 listeners). Michael Scott reads it straight and clean, which is a defensible choice for Saki. The prose deserves to be savored - those sentences are so precisely built that overdramatizing them would be like putting ketchup on a good steak.
But here's my complaint: a story this dependent on social performance - on the difference between what these Edwardian guests say and what they mean - practically begs for a narrator who leans into the class distinctions. Tobermory's voice should carry the casual indifference of a creature who literally does not understand shame. The guests should sound increasingly desperate under their politesse. Scott gives you a competent reading. I wanted interpretation. I wanted the narrator to understand that the pause between Lady Blemley asking a question and the silence that follows is the whole joke. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation - or should. Here, the timing feels a bit rushed in spots where lingering would've landed harder.
That said, for a free or near-free listen? It does the job. You'll get the story. You just won't get the full performance.
Who Should Press Play (and Who Shouldn't Bother)
If you love Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, or Evelyn Waugh - anyone who weaponized wit against the upper classes while being thoroughly of the upper classes - this is essential. If you loved "The Importance of Being Earnest," "Tobermory" is its spiritual successor in miniature: a drawing-room comedy where the drawing room is a cage.
My students would hate this. They'd say nothing happens. I love it precisely because the nothing happening is the point - the entire structure of polite society depends on nothing happening, on nobody saying the true thing out loud. The second someone does? (Or somecat does?) Chaos.
Skip it if you need plot momentum or action. This is a single scene, a single joke really, executed with surgical precision.
The Lesson Plan I Won't Use But Want To
At twenty-one minutes, this is practically a palette cleanser between longer listens. Stick it between chapters of whatever 40-hour fantasy epic you're grinding through. It'll remind you that brevity isn't just the soul of wit - sometimes it's the whole body. Saki doesn't waste a single word, and at 1.0x speed, you can feel the architecture of every sentence.
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. Though at this length, you could finish it before Principal Martinez gets through the first budget slide.
