Listener 4857: The Art of the Possible by Poat

Now there’s an intriguing title: I wonder what hare Poat might have set running this time? (Poor chap: there’s no escape from the poor animal now.) We can sure it will be a good ’un though, so let’s see.

We need to confess straight up that half of Dash found this really very difficult, so the solving journey just reflects one of us this time. The survivor took their usual approach, after a careful look at the preamble, of trying to spot the theme and get the message as early as possible. So – a pioneering mathematical treatise whose title and author’s surname only added up to 15 letters. A bit of research came up with four, with our money on one of the first two which avoided some awkward words to grid later.

1. ARS MAGNA – CARDANO
2. ALMAGEST – PTOLEMY
3. DE THIENDE – STEVIN
4. STOICHEIA – EUCLID

We weren’t sure yet what the “adjustments” would be, but they were going to produce words (the “leads” must we thought be initial letters spelling out the message) and had to fit the original spaces of the answers: anagrams? So it was.

With all that in mind we focussed on the across clues to try and pick out a message. When the first three proved to be from the set of 24 with “acted” giving “cadet”, “uncorseted” giving “unescorted” and “boredom” giving “bedroom” it was hard to miss CUB(IC), and Wikipedia quickly informed us that the subject of Cardano’s treatise was CUBIC AND QUARTIC EQUATIONS – which turned out to be our message.

After that it was a steady solve, with the 24 answers generating the message being fairly easy to solve, but the ones generating anagrams of the answers much less so. Once most of the former were written in though we had enough letters in many cases to look through lists of potential entries and spot the one that anagrammed to our answer.

The final stage was to adapt two rows to give CARDANO and ARS MAGNA. As the method was almost certainly, from a setter of Poat’s class, going to be more anagrams rather than random changes, the top and bottom rows soon produced the goods, and we were done.

We thought the clueing was excellent, with remarkably good surface reads given the transformations needed, more or less keeping good sense both before and after the anagrams. Kudos to Poat! The only technical hitch that worried us was in 22d “Culmination of Northern Irelans abandoning Orangism (6)” where “Orangism” loses NI from “Northern Ireland” to give ORAGSM which anagrams to ORGASM for “culmination” (generating the O of EQUATIONS) – but ORAGSM of course isn’t a “real word” which feels awkward since all the other ones to be anagrammed are. (See the comments below for the explanation…)

On the plus side. We loved the cheekiness of 21a “Saintly (NASTILY) towel acceptable in PVC? ( 7)” for WETLOOK and 31a “Lionel’s nudity (UNTIDY) creating an artistic impression (6)” for NIELLO – together with some of the best anagram indicating we’ve seen. Our last entry (doh! given the solver’s profession) was to remember that 29d “Joel’s neighbour is coming after a tick (4)” didn’t require a refresher course in Australian soaps but remembering that AMOS comes next to JOEL in the Old Testament …

After all that it was a pleasure to indulge in a little “vintage” (32a ESSENCIA – very nice too) with Poat and celebrate his membership of the Listener Oenophile Club and a superb puzzle too.