Book Review : My Uncle Silas by H.E. Bates

These fourteen short stories about Uncle Silas are superb.

H.E. Bates based the character of Uncle Silas on Joseph Betts, the husband of Bates’s maternal grandmother’s sister, Mary Ann. Betts was born at the beginning of the 1840s and could recall the arrival of news about the Crimean War, brought by a messenger on a white horse.

In all these stories, Uncle Silas is an old man, an old man with stories to tell about his younger days, stories that include factual accounts, country legends, and tales of fiction designed to catch out friends who claim to have seen the world, when Silas knows full well that they haven’t.

The narrator is a young boy who is enamoured of Silas’s crusty charm and semi-serious banter with his housekeeper who threatens to leave almost everyday but comes back for more.