EV 1696 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1696 (Hints)

Airy by Chalicea

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Dave Hennings’ database at xwdb.info tells us that today’s setter has had at least 186 barred puzzles published under her aliases Chalicea and Curmudgeon, and that’s before any collaborations are taken into account. The first appeared in the Magpie magazine in October 2009, which  indicates an average of something close to one every month since. Wow!

In an attempt to deduce the theme of Airy, I thought I’d look for the puzzles from her canon whose titles most closely resembled it. From several single adjectives, I thought ‘Blowing’ (2014) and ‘Careless’ (2021) were the nearest; the first turned out to be about the poem In Flanders Fields, and the second about the novel The Great Gatsby. Could we be looking once again at the world of literature? In the list of dramatis personae for The Tempest, Ariel is described as ‘an airy Spirit’, but he isn’t a ‘work’. How about The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Sounds airy? – tick. Written in a foreign language? – tick. Seven words in the title? – well, not precisely, but Chalicea may have miscounted…

Preamble: The wordplay of clues to four, seven, and eight-letter entries leads to an extra letter that is not required by the answer. In clue order these will guide solvers to an AIRY work whose seven-word title appears in the grid in a foreign language. Solvers must change nine letters, producing new real words, to show an English translation of the title. The circled letters will give further help.

There’s just one gimmick to deal with – the wordplays in 24 clues (the ones that lead to answers of four, seven and eight letters) yield the answer plus an extra letter; so if the clue were “Setter demolished éclair with tea (8)”, the wordplay gives CHA plus an anagram of ECLAIR, the answer is CHALICEA, and the bonus letter is R. Before starting on the solve, I would strongly recommend marking either the 24 special clues or the 27 normal ones so you immediately know which are which (I put a dash alongside each of the latter, to make the emerging message as clear as possible.)

The usual ‘Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended‘ has been omitted, purely because of space constraints.

Across

15a  Desire American quid of tobacco, say (4)
The 4-letter word for a quid of tobacco is also the word for what you might do with one.

16a  Have corrupt dealings with time for power, violent blow with nothing lost (6)
Probably the toughest clue in the puzzle. The ‘violent blow’ gives us a 7-letter ‘violent SW wind’ (named after the vast, treeless plain with which it is associated) that suffers both the loss of a single letter and the replacement of one single-letter abbreviation by another. The answer is a familiar word.

25a  Neat houses near reserve (5)
The difficulty is working out which bit makes up the (mildly oblique) definition in this clue where the wordplay comprises a short word and a slightly longer abbreviation.

31a  More snarly local cop cast out in ludicrous overpricing (7)
A subtractive anagram, with one word that’s been ‘cast’ (moulded) taken out of another that’s ‘ludicrous’ (absurd). The presence of the bonus letter makes the answer (a word shown by Chambers as ‘dialect’, hence the ‘local’) a little trickier to identify, although the ‘more’ in the definition means that the last two letters aren’t difficult to guess.

41a  Northern bills admitting the Spanish instruments (6)
The hard part of the wordplay here is the 4-letter ‘Scot and N Eng dialect’ word for beaks, bills, or the bits at the business end of fountain pens (the familiar word for which it closely resembles).

45a  I become hostile about any change resulting in same formula but different structure (9)
A combination of a single letter from the clue and a 4-letter word meaning ‘become hostile’ are placed about a word meaning ‘any’. The definition looks as though it ought to lead to a noun rather than a verb, but I’m not sure that I could come up with anything much better – ‘modify in structure alone’, perhaps.

Down

2d    Trumps abnormal brilliance discounting eastern learner (7)
The anagram fodder here is reduced by two separate letters before giving up the bonus letter. The Trumps are not Donald and Melania, neither are they the cards in a particular suit – the fact that the anagrist doesn’t contain an S suggests that the answer could be the plural of a noun which has come directly from another language.

3d  Base scheme of layout increases dangerous undertakings, once (8)
I believe that the type of clue which Ximenes termed a ‘charade’ (after the party game) is known to some solvers as an IKEA, since the wordplay comes as a flat-pack, although those of a certain age might feel that it should be an MFI. In this 1+3+5 example which starts with a mathematical symbol, the bonus letter is surrendered by the second element. The answer is shown by Chambers as ‘archaic’, as suggested by ‘once’; whether such words need to be flagged is a moot point, given that they are ‘not absolutely obsolete but no longer in general use’, although this one must be hanging on by a thread.

7d  Get wind of home circle with no surface tension (4)
A 6-letter word for a specific part of a house, often seen preceding ‘and home’ in an alliterative phrase, gives up first one letter and then another. I have shown ‘of’ as being part of the definition, although strictly speaking it should be viewed as a link between definition and wordplay, since the answer would also need to be followed by ‘of’ to achieve the required sense.

20d  Every one hale, boundlessly fresh and youthful in verse (6)
It is generally accepted that adverbs when used for letter selection can be applied to multiple words, eg ‘finally get to London’ for TON, and there is no reason why adverbial deletion indicators shouldn’t be allowed to work the same way. Whether ‘boundlessly’ can legitimately indicate ‘without bounds’ is perhaps a different matter.

25d  Very fast ride with oar, one delves deeply (8)
Nouns of four (initially) and five letters combine to produce the answer here, which is not in Chambers. It can be found in Collins, but I doubt that you’ll feel the need to check it.

34d  In one direction penetrated Apocryphal book (5)
A 2-letter word of many meanings is followed by a word meaning ‘penetrated’, often compounded with ‘into’ in this sense.

Definitions in clues are underlined

A good helping of straightforward clues and the absence of unclued entries should mean that the solve progresses steadily. The start of the emerging message might appear to comprise an unlikely series of three consonants, but if they don’t strike any chords then looking them up in Chambers will prove worthwhile. If – like me – you don’t know the work in question, then a bit of googling based on the message will furnish both the original title and the English translation. Finding the former in the grid isn’t too challenging, and it’s good to see real words emerging as you do the in situ translation. It’s unlikely that you will need the ‘further help’ of the circled letters, which take us into a third language.

Some of the clues were at the tougher end of the Chalicea range, but the route through to the satisfying conclusion was well signposted.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾 (Suitable for all)

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