Kates House Mmp — Harriet Waugh

The daughter of Evelyn Waugh purrs into this hilarious and deliciously evil fantasy with: "Once upon a time there was a little girl called Kate." Four years old and horrid, Kate Brett has been given a large Victorian doll house. And the Twilight Zone-ish gimmick here, freshly filled out with sheer nastiness, is that Kate's unpleasant fantasies about her doll-house's imaginary inhabitants will actually control the fates of the tenants of a certain derelict Netting Hill Gate boarding-house. If, for instance, Kate muses "someone would be imprisoned in the attic," it's likely that the Netting Hill Gate residents will at some point find a child's corpse in their attic. Among the people whose lives come under Kate's whimsical, meanspirited control: middle-aged Robert and Margery MacDougal, who--thanks to Robert's manic-depressive euphoria, have been forced from the Chelsea Good Life to squatter-dom in Netting Hill Gate; black Princess Lily of Mutendere, who's lingering in the slums while waiting for another coup in her country (and the key to her brother's Belgravia apartment); baby-nurse Pearl, who's handily available when Margery, 46, is surprised by pregnancy; and elderly Harold, who attracts the odd passion of Princess Lily--while his stepdaughter Eleanora fights off a bleak adulthood. . . and Pearl's dog Billy turns (thanks to Kate again) into a dragon. Kate allows her marionettes a few jolly household moments: a christening party, a Christmas dinner. She allows Princess Lily to go to the Royal Wedding--while Eleanor goes to a "Don't do it, Di!" disco. But then, wonders Kate, what if fireworks set the house afire. . . ! And, in an epilogue, grownup Kate--still awful--views the house with her fiancÃ? and realtor. ("Disgusting!" she says.) Not for those with tender sensibilities or a lack of whimsical imagination--but a gem of social satire twirling within a playfully Pirandello-esque setting.