Word: fingal
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Like many another dashing Irishman, from Swift to George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde deemed it his destiny to invade England and take London by storm. He succeeded in fulfilling this destiny because he knew that though Britons never yield to force, they are ready to surrender the Bank of England itself to a man who can make them laugh...
...boys, aged 8 and 9, were wrenched from the security of a happy family life in Victorian London and sent abroad like fugitive criminals to forget their past, their parenthood and even their names. The crime from which they fled was that of being born the sons of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, the most famous and quite suddenly the most notorious literary figure...
...family Negro house, planted another cross and set it ablaze. Then they moved on to the home of Negro Dentist James C. Wallace Jr. and blasted away at his house with a shotgun. The next night, a bullet zinged through a window of Dentist W. A. Fingal's house. About the same time, a dynamite bomb exploded in Negro Physician Urbane F. Bass's backyard. Another bomb was tossed in front of the tire shop belonging to Vice President Henry Dyson of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P...
Having prepared their own destruction, Pelancey and Fingal are finally driven to half-ludicrous, half-pathetic efforts at confession and penance. Perhaps the worst of it, for Fingal, is seeing himself in his true identity, "in all its shabby unworthiness." Pelancey learns his bitter bit of wisdom: "What's the sense in running away, when you know that at the end o' the journey you'll meet yourself...
...occasional lapses into stilted novelistic clichés, and its too convenient ending which veils coincidence with the appearance of fatality. But for the most part, Mist on the Waters is as good as a first-rate movie thriller. With somebody like Barry Fitzgerald playing the part of Barty Fingal, Hollywood could have a story to work with...