Woodiss Wins (ePub)

Woodiss speaks directly to you. He presents himself as a hapless buffoon, exploited by his family and employer and the many women who prey on him. These range from a teenage housemaid who fancies a place in literary history, to an aging widow who believes Woodiss can persuade her son, a dissolute Glaswegian doctor, to enter the priesthood. Among them is Miriam, a beautiful young spiritualist, who claims she has been instructed by his late wife to provide him with comforts. These include 'practices' which, she tells him breathlessly, she has 'heard of but never indulged in.' Their prolonged and often farcical courtship forms a large part of his story. The tenderness that he starts to feel for Miriam does not spare her from his mockery, however. Like him, like everybody, she is a figure of fun, another participant in the farce. WOODISS WINS is the third part of the trilogy AND WOODISS GETS AWAY WITH IT. In WOODISS IS WILLING, Part One, he told how, as a young man, a WW1 hero, driven by circumstance to work as a gamekeeper, he was seduced by his boss's wife. WOODISS WAITS described his life during the first years of WW2. Discharged by the army, at a loss what to do, he decided to mark time till the end of the war. He took a job at an institution run by an extreme religious sect. He soon realized that the members were trying to recruit him to their faith. Later, however, it emerged that some of them had another, less worthy purpose in mind. In WOODISS WINS the sect achieve their aims. The effects are disastrous and provide the dramatic end to Woodiss's story.