Hector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer. Like his influence, Rudyard Kipling, Hector Hugh Munro was an Englishman by blood, born under the British Raj, in what is now modern-day Myanmar. His father was a police chief in Burma. Munro never knew him well. He knew his mother even less; she died shortly after being traumatized by the charging of a cow. Munro was principally raised by two aunts, and although he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps as a policeman in the colonies, he had to leave the force after contracting malaria. It was during his recovery period that he decided to become a writer. In The Hounds of Fate, the aptly-named protagonist Martin stoner is described as being limp and powerless. His defining feature is "natural slothfulness and improvidence had always intervened to blight any chance of even moderate success." Stoner is a wanderer, with no ambition or potential for change because he lacks the motivation with which to make any changes to his internal or external life. Letting life happen to him, rather than seizing the moment, "hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain, and he could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder what underlying impulse was driving him onward." This is the moment when Stoner's fate seems to change, at least for a while. An old man mistakes Martin Stoner for a man named Uncle Tom… Listen online to free English audiobook "The Hounds of Fate” on our website to experience Saki's work.
