Auberon Waugh (1939–2001)

Auberon Waugh's first novel, The Foxglove Saga, is a comic novel very much in the style of his father's earlier books and the result is very successful. Its hero, Martin Foxglove, is an abominably flawless paragon. While at school Martin chooses a set of friends considered inappropriate by his family and he abandons his Christian faith. His story and that of his friends, particularly the ugly, middle-class Kenneth Stoat and the unfortunate Martin O'Connor, makes for a slyly humorous and show more sometimes sadly funny novel.
The plot is intentionally absurd, built around the central character's desire to implement the seven corporal Works of Mercy. The catholic Lady Foxglove parades them one by one, treating the list as if it provided some definitive road map to saintliness, while liberally reinterpreting her own self-interested actions as charitable ones, in order to cross another required work from the list. The irony here is that while the list provides some guidance as to how the merciful should act in advancing the welfare of others, Lady Foxglove's interventions always reduce the happiness of her intended beneficiaries.

I do not claim to have understood all of the sardonic details that Waugh includes but the story has plenty of references that are clear to anyone familiar with twentieth century British literature, especially if the name Waugh is below the title. The comic attitude of the book seems to be that any official machinery—the school, the hospital, the Army—can be made to go wrong by individual determination and lying. I would suggest that it is not Mr. Waugh who is amoral and cruel, but the machinery in which his characters are caught. Anarchism of this sort is viable, if not as a basis for life, at least for a comic novel and in his creation Auberon compares well with his more famous father as his first novel continues the family tradition of irreverent humor. show less

Sadly there is very little to recommend this novel. I had hoped it would contain some of the scathing humour present in Bron Waugh's columns for Private Eye and the Spectator, but it offers little beyond cardboard characters in a pasteboard setting drenched with malice. There are isolated pockets of amusement to be found, but they are not worth trudging through the rest of this unpleasant book to find.

Quite frank and open account of the first fifty years of the well-known columnist. Many interesting episodes if you have some familiarity with or knowledge of the places and times described. Not sure if if it would be very useful to a reader who lacked this. Waugh accurately shows up some of the absurdities of upper middle class English life, and revels in them.

Jamey Sligger and Frazer-Robinson leave public school and go up to Oxford. This book is set in the early sixties and is a curious period piece, Waugh's satire on class, religion, politics and progressive sensibilities is the world of Bertie Wooster in head-on collision with the world of student protest. Waugh handles it with his usual poison pen, no sensibility is left unstabbed.

I confess, I'm too young to recognise what is being satirised, too agnostic to understand the Catholicism and too show more much of a churl to have been to public school. Despite that, I enjoyed the collection of grotesques and Waugh is a good storyteller show less