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THE BODY'S GUEST by Angue MacLeod

THE BODY'S GUEST

By

Pub Date: June 1st, 1959
Publisher: Roy

Springboarded from a gadget, this romps through the interchange of bodies that takes place when an East Indian, humiliated and angered by his reception in a Scottish village, makes use of his invention to pay back his detractors. But a gathering causes a complete switch -- the Wee Free minister's body is inhabited by the drunkard's and vice versa; the schoolmaster and the Indian are exchanged as are the Tory and the Labour candidate, two suitors for the same girl, and a crotchety old man and a bull.... The ensuing incidents, as all wait for the Indian to repair his invention and return the proper souls to their rightful bodies, are eye-opening for all and, when two doctors become involved in the proceedings, it is on an island that the status quo is restored -- but not to the doctors since they are caught in an exchange that affects them. That each finds the swapping a most illuminating experience --observing ""the material world through the body of another"" -- and finding tolerance in their unexpected hosts, is an extra dividend to the high-tempered entertainment here provided in which the Thorne Smith type of pattern is softened and concentrated into an artfully amusing tale.