Another story from 1972, and could it be any more different? Elizabeth Taylor is one of those writers who are shared among fans with a passionate adoration. I discovered her through social media, where a group of writers, all female, were waxing absolutely lyrical about her novel Angel, which I picked up and read in two days. I’ve since read most of her novels and short stories. They are all, without exception, exquisite, darkly funny, and delivered with the kind of precision only a genius of wit and observation can muster.
The short story Taylor is perhaps best known for is ‘The Fly-Paper’, which has the same speechless horror about it as ‘The Lottery’, by Shirley Jackson (who I sometimes think of as the dark American cousin to Taylor’s sharp-edged Englishness).
But I’ve picked ‘The Devastating Boys’. It’s a fairly challenging read to begin with, because the language describing the two Black boys who come to stay with a middle-class couple in Oxfordshire in the sixties is very much of its time. If you can’t get past that, then perhaps avoid. But if you *do* get past it you’ll find a novel’s worth of characterisation in barely 20 pages, as well as perhaps the best description of the tendency we’ve come to call ‘white saviourhood’ I’ve ever read. It is gloriously funny and just gorgeous. I can’t say better than that.
Collected in The Devastating Boys, Chatto & Windus, 1972
A Personal Anthology 