Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)

John Courtney Boot is a novelist of modest success, having published eight books, each of which sold about fifteen thousand copies and were read by a well-respected type. William Boot is the author of the Beast’s bi-weekly column Lush Places devoted to nature, a champion of “the questing voleand chronicler of the habits of the badger. Uncle Theodore is, well, someone else altogether. Boot, John Courtney not William, is backed by a lady of some repute in a conversation with Lord Copper, show more editor of the Beast, as a candidate to be the paper’s foreign correspondent in Ishmelia, where a revolution is breaking out. Boot, William not John Courtney, gets the assignment. William descends on the tiny and peaceful, it turns out, nation with dozens of other journalists, and they begin wagging the dog. William trips onto the a story while the rest of the foreign correspondents trek to a non-existent war-torn city. William returns to London Boot, John Courtney not William, receives a knighthood for the reporting, while Boot, Uncle Theodore neither John Courtney nor William, is feted by Lord Copper.

When I read [A Handful of Dust], my first exposure to Evelyn Waugh, I found myself chuckling through the tragic story. But [Scoop] had me laughing aloud. Waugh writes with a sharp comic timing and a keen eye for the absurd. Wild twists and crossed signals throughout the story mark Waugh’s smart imagination. And his characters, especially the hapless William, are quirky without being flat, eccentric without being stereotypical.

Waugh, himself a journalist for Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, does not have a very high opinion of journalists and the news media. The send-up of journalists, casting them as manipulative concoctors, makes the novel timeless – the world of news may have changed with the television and the internet but you can see the same kind of entertainment-minded, policy-driven manipulators at work in [Scoop] as must work at Fox News or CNN today.

Bottom Line: Smartly imaginative and very funny send up of journalism – a real comedy of errors.

5 bones!!!!!
A Favorite for the Year. show less

This is the second book in Waugh's "Sword of Honor" trilogy about the exploits of Guy Crouchback, an officer in the British Army during World War Two. As was the first in the trio, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is a sometimes gentle, sometimes scathing satire on war and the British class system as well. Crouchback is pleasant, well-meaning, capable and intelligent, if somewhat inept socially. Around him swirls a system that seems to get on quite despite itself. While some of show more Crouchback's fellow officers match him in quality, many are incompetent, fraudulent, cowardly or all three. Assignments are muddled, missions are planned, revised, then canceled with no explanations forthcoming to the men waiting to embark upon troop ships to carry them out. Amidst all this, Crouchback waits vainly to get into the war. When his group finally goes, it's to a calamitous campaign in Crete, and things get only worse.

Waugh's great sense of humor, and language, keep the narrative running briskly and enjoyably. But the full sense of satire and fun that runs through the first book are here joined by something darker, a keen sadness, even a sense of despair. Writing and rereading this, it occurs to me that this book reminds me in that respect of Catch 22, if you could imagine that book with humor less broad and written by an Englishman.

I guess it's a little hard to tell by reading this that I actually enjoyed Officers and Gentlemen a lot. The reader comes to care about Guy and many of his friends, and almost all of the characters, except the very worst of the lot, are treated by Waugh with an affectionate kindness. I don't know how Waugh intended these books, but as anti-war and anti-bureaucracy dark comedies, they are effecting and memorable. show less

Just as acerbic as Vile Bodies but less charming; just as morally outraged as Sword of Honour but with less pathos; Put Out More Flags falls uncomfortably between two stools. It bruises its rump, and retreats into an air of umbrage that undermines the humour, frequently. It's an appropriate document of the "phony war" in that sense, embodying-not-just-depicting a lot of the pettiness and irrelevance of an interwar Britain that hadn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the war was no longer show more "inter." And as a result it's cool in the last pages how all that falls away (goodbye, all that!) as everyone starts to catch up and understand that they've entered a time to try their souls. A purification, but one with ironic bite when you know about Waugh's own history in the war--this book was written in 1942, after a couple of bungled attempts on his part to nobly give his all to make the world safe for patrician constitutional toffness, but when the victory still hung in the balance and he still had hopes of reaching his apotheosis. There would be more bungles, and a deeper disillusionment devastatingly chronicled in Sword of Honour, which makes this book seem small--a blinkered smallness mistaking itself for realism, the Chamberlain to Sword of Honour's (cos albeit the man was a warmonger and war criminal, a racist and a glutton, and we reject big man history and find the Allied win in the overwhelming industrial economics of the thing, he was still in some wise a titan) Churchill. show less

I'm not quite sure how to feel about 'Brideshead Revisited', to be honest. I found it beautifully written and appealing, with the atmosphere of a vivid dream. I couldn't quite get a handle on the characters, who seemed both oddly familiar and frustratingly unreal. Sometimes I felt as though I'd met members of the Marchmain family, at other moments they seemed alien. Possibly this is due to my confused and ambivalent feelings about the upper class stratum this novel is set within.

That said, show more Charles' infatuation with Sebastian was bittersweet and very involving. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about the novel was the absence of closure for their relationship. Did they ever meet again? What happened to Sebastian? I'd love to know, although the novel's pervasive nostalgia would probably be jarred by any such conclusion. Sebastian himself reminded me of Mishima's hero in 'Spring Snow', Kioaki. Both are bewitching, beautiful, tragic wastrels. I preferred Waugh's narration by someone who loves the tragic hero to Mishima giving the point of view to the wastrel himself, though. Charles is an interesting narrator, as he is clearly very emotionally controlled, seemingly editing himself in places and unaware of his own feelings in others. This is perhaps as nostalgic of its time as everything else in the book. Likewise the apparent tacit understanding but silence regarding the romantic, very likely also sexual, involvement of Charles and Sebastian.

To me, the most striking scene in the book was the debate around Lord Marchmain's deathbed. I was impressed with the cynicism of the argument about deathbed conversions, despite the outcome. Although Catholicism and its attendant guilt haunted the book, the message I took from it was that for the Marchmain family religion had become a means to justify their life decisions, rather than a faith as such. That is likely my own cynicism talking, I'm sure it could be interpreted otherwise. It makes for an intriguing theme, certainly.

Upon writing this, my main feeling for 'Brideshead Revisited' seems to be that I enjoyed it, but feel a little sullied by nostalgia for a world of privilege, snobbery, and over-entitlement. I took the novel quite personally, perhaps. It certainly has great power about it. show less