Berry And Van Rijn

Dornford Yates' character, Berry Pleydell, is supposed to be a great comic creation. I confess to not finding him so. But he has one point in common with Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn. For both, social interaction is one long dramatic performance. Van Rijn enacts outrage when Chee Lan haggles about her fee for a dangerous mission - then both enjoy the ensuing argument. Berry, if inconvenienced, will claim that, despite his goodness of heart, everyone else is against him - and his cousins will shake with mirth, to my continual irritation.

The difference is that van Rijn has struggled first for survival, then for success, whereas Berry, an Edwardian gentleman of leisure, has never had to work for a living yet wants his comfortable life-style, employing a small army of domestic servants, to continue indefinitely. As Isaac Asimov wrote about another English author:

"...I don't entirely agree with Tolkien's view of technology. I am not used to the calm pleasures of an upper-class Englishman in a preindustrial day. I know very well that the mass of humanity - including me and mine - derives what comfort they now have from the advance of technology and I do not want to abandon it so that upper-class Englishmen can substitute servants for machines. I don't want to be a servant. While I recognize the dangers of technology, I want those dangers corrected while keeping the benefits."
-Isaac Asimov, Introduction IN Martin H. Greenberg (Ed.), Isaac's Universe, Volume Two, Phases In Chaos (New York, 1991), pp. ix-xiv AT p. xiii.

Which might be easier said than done, at least for a while.