Spring is in the air – and it’s time to see what Skylark is offering us this time.
A happily concise preamble and Skylark’s usual very accessible clueing style meant that this was one of our easier solves. Some squawk at that, but we think it’s not at all bad if say 5 of a year’s puzzles are the sort a new solver can tackle, and another 5 are ones that even old hands struggle with, the rest spread out in between. (The Magpie nearly always includes an A grade after all.)
38 clues needed a surplus letter removing before solving. (That left 4 that didn’t at 6, 22, 30 and 32 down, with no special reason for that being so.) The letters spelled out AN ABSURD SITUATION IN WHICH ONE CAN NEVER WIN, which is part of Chambers’ definition of Catch-22, from the title of Joseph Heller’s well-known novel. And CATCH in the top row together with JOSEPH HELLER snaking neatly below it twice in the shape of 22 gave the required highlighting to finish the puzzle.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Often the theme and message will pop out quite early and help with solving the clues, but perhaps because the clues were quite easy and the words of the message not quickly obvious, this time our grid was nearly full before we looked at the latter and moved to the endgame.
The extra letters were very well handled, making some sort of surface sense both before and after their extraction, which we like, and most of the clues were succinct too. One of the longer ones was also one of the hardest; “Trapping yttrium [a]tom, say, Oscar regularly brings protective gear (13, two words)” = SAFETY CATCHES. “Tom” for the CAT in the middle of the clue was nicely disguised as “atom” which went smoothly with “yttrium”. That was there for Y though, so YCAT was trapped by SA (“Oscar regularly”) and FETCHES (“brings”) – with the “say” in there because “tom” for CAT is a definition by example. Fair but tricky with Oscar not equalling O, and “protective gear” not immediately bringing SAFETY CATCHES to mind. We persevered and cracked it though which opened up the top half of the puzzle.
33a “Very long time after Pe[t]e’s section of poem (5)” for PAEON needed care as the O was unchecked, and though PAEAN neither fits the w
ordplay (P(ee) AEON) nor the sense (it means a whole song not a metric foot in one) it was an easy write-in and may have caught some of us out – especially if we took “very long time” to be EON not AEON and gave up on trying to parse “Pee” to give PA and just left it at that.
2d “When [c]rank has entered exams (7)” for A-LEVELS shouldn’t have given us trouble and the answer was clear enough except we got it into our little heads (before we deduced that C was the extra letter) that a “crank” was a LEVER and wondered how Homer could have nodded and clued that not LEVEL. Doh!
We worried for a while that Skylark had deserted the Oenophile Club but at the last minute the PUB< in 22d BRUSHUP appeared, so we’ll join her there for a quick half and hope she carries on setting for us.