Waugh, Evelyn

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An odd but interesting assortment
Mockery and Company
Like Bathing In Bubbles And Acid
For Wauvian Worshippers
An assault on England's class structure?

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Vile Bodies
Decline and Fall
A Handful of Dust
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ASIN: 0316925462

Amazon.com

Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master--the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers--was no less adept when it came to the short form. Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. Wodehouse. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place: <blockquote> It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church.... A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning. </blockquote> Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). In "Compassion," a 1949 tale that belies the author's vaunted anti-Semitism, a mere glimpse of some Yugoslavian partisans leads to this superabundant sentence: "He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels." Nobody can accuse Waugh of squishy sentimentality--remember, romantic prose is strictly for convalescents. Still, The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses.

Book Description

"As a writer of satiric and comic stories, Evelyn Waugh remains unmatched among modern writers." -New York Times Book Review

For the first time, all of Evelyn Waugh's stories-thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career-are brought together in a single volume. The result: a book of brilliant entertainments.

The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to a one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long, linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

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Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century's wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy.

Customer Reviews:

An odd but interesting assortment.......2006-10-03

To lump together the contents of this book as "stories" is a bit misleading. It includes unused or uncompleted fragments from novels, some clever but forgettable quick sketches published in magazines, one or two genuine short stories, and some very unfortunate juvenilia and senilia. Waugh's stories are mostly inferior to his novels, but there are one or two gems here.

The most rewarding discovery for me was two chapters from Work Suspended, a novel Waugh started during the war but never finished. In it he puts aside the broadly satirical point of view of his early novels in favor of the more realistic and subjective style that would find its culmination in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. I can only guess why he didn't finish it -- certainly the difficult circumstances of the war were a primary reason, but the bits included here suggest that he was just on the verge of painting himself into a corner, plotwise. Read it and decide for yourself.

The other delightful surprise is the last story, Basil Seal Rides Again, in which we rejoin the memorably cynical antihero of the early novels for one last escapade on the threshold of old age. If only Waugh had returned to that vein a little earlier, but alas, the rest of the postwar stories seem to reflect only his undisguised bitterness at the (for him) dystopia of the British welfare state.

Those who like A Handful of Dust (which I consider his masterpiece) might want to read the two alternative endings Waugh wrote, The Man Who Liked Dickens (published separately as a short story), and By Special Request, a decidedly inferior version.

There's also Charles Ryder's Schooldays, a sort of prequel to Brideshead Revisited, which seems not to have been published at all until the success of the TV series caused it to be unearthed.

But if you're new to Waugh, don't start with this book. Read one of the early novels first -- I especially recommend Decline and Fall, but Vile Bodies or Black Mischief would also be a good choice.

Mockery and Company.......2006-04-18

Besides the fact that many think he's a woman, Evelyn Waugh is one of those greatly misunderstood writers. With the slapstick humor of P.G. Woodhouse, the subtlety and irony of E.M. Forster, the sarcasm and mockery of Oscar Wilde, the eloquence of English of Henry James, and the social criticism of Swift, Waugh's stories are delightfully filled with attributes all of.

His stories are prevalently snapshots into a marriage or some aristocratic relationship between two either ignorant or vile parties. His characters are not likable, but somehow it's so seductive to go on reading about these awful people. My personal favorite story is about a husband who, worried about his wife's fidelity, buys her a dog named after him to remind him of her while he travels to Africa on business. She, however, begins an affair with another man, only to end it not because of her husband, but because of the dog. This relationship mirrors her marriage, and in turn, she `dumps' the dog for another one. The rejected dog goes on to bite the nose of his former owner. In another story, a newly married couple is accidentally separated on the night of their honeymoon. The husband, somewhat not in the throws of love, decides to visit on old college buddy. This instigates a trail of incidents, all unfortunate, that prevents the couple from uniting for a week. The wife, realizing that she doesn't particularly miss her new husband, decides it might be better not for them to ever meet again.

Sit down for 10 minutes at a time with these unabashed comedies. If you like to smirk, you will love these.

Like Bathing In Bubbles And Acid.......2005-12-20

Meanness to your fellow man is no virtue unless you write fiction, especially the kind perfected by the 20th century's most celebrated malcontent, Evelyn Waugh. Then it can be quite fun, especially when offered small but pungent doses like you get here.

A collection of Waugh's shorter fiction, including several novellas and some pieces written while a child and college student, "The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh" is an entertaining, satisfying demonstration of both the breadth and wit of one of English fiction's finest stylists, not to mention a place to get to know Waugh better after reading his better-known novels like "Handful Of Dust" and "The Loved One."

You don't think of Waugh as a punchy writer, at least I didn't from reading the above novels and especially his "Sword Of Honor" trilogy. When your most successful film adaptation runs 11 hours, a writer isn't expected to shine in short sprints. But all his novels have their sharp dramatic moments, sudden reversals and even shock endings. Waugh was best known for his dialogue and descriptive prose, but "Complete Stories" drives home the point that Waugh could spin a yarn and cap it off with the best of them.

Take perhaps the two best-known stories here, "Bella Fleace Gave A Party" and "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing," both of which showcase Waugh's celebrated misanthropy with stories that are not only keenly realized but carry you along at a brisk pace before dropping you on a dime. You feel for sad Bella, especially, yet Waugh's satirical send-up of social mores leaves a delicious aftertaste, however cruelly presented, because of the cleverness of his invention.

Other stories work that way, too. "Incident In Azania," with its story of a young woman kidnapped in Africa, could be an O. Henry story, namely "The Ransom Of Red Chief." "The Sympathetic Passenger" reminds one of Stephen King, a story of picking up the wrong hitchhiker that is frightening, funny, and gallops along to a quick jolting conclusion.

As a dog lover, my favorite story has to be "On Guard," a gentler tale about a suitor who buys his ladylove a dog named Hector and instructs it to keep any other likely Romeos away until his return from sea, a "commission" the pup takes very seriously. "He understands everything," the woman coos, not realizing how right she is as he barks at and pees on every male who walks through her door.

There's also a couple of forays into science fiction, not to mention a prequel to "Brideshead Revisited," and an alternate ending to "Handful Of Dust" worth reading for those who liked those books at least. Even the less successful works, of which there are a few, are entertaining most of the way through, not to mention illuminating of Waugh's singular mindset, which could look compassionately one moment upon the plight of Jewish refugees in the Balkans and serve up a farcical matrimonial murder the next.

The biggest drawback to this volume is the lack of any secondary material. No introduction, no footnotes, not even headers above each of the stories telling you when they were written or why. It's a sizeable omission, especially for the juvenilia, where spelling mistakes are about the only clue you get as to the author's age.

But there's no better place to get Waugh in his most concentrated form, a perfect companion for a trip to idle away an hour under the sun, pondering life's arbitrary cruelties from multiple vantage points in the company of a cheerful, fascinating cynic.

For Wauvian Worshippers.......2002-05-18

Evelyn Waugh is the author of my favorite book, "Decline and Fall" and I am also extremely positive about most of his other novels. This volume would have been better named the Complete Short Fiction as it is more a study of starts, new endings, periods, etc. and some short stories. This must be part of a Waugh-obsessed person's library, and I consider myself one of that distinction. ... This collection is like a lost treasure map for his familiars. It includes a story which can only be an attempt to subvert a considerable anti-semetic theme in his work. It provides a time and place coincidental with the failure of his marriage that his fictional marriages carry sinister, if comedic overtones. He even wrote self-parody, in the characters that were bloated boors, alchohol reddened old men, undeniably like himself.

Frankly, I can't imagine a world without the old impossibly wicked, toad. ... He was gallingly honest when it came to intolerance for silly, selfish theater of human beings. He skewered irresistably, an African royal celebration desperately trying to seem European. And the book adds to his best known cruelty toward the champagne swilling beautiful young things, lacking in the most basic human instincts, especially towards children, passion for others or ideals. (He was not considered a loving parent, by any means.)
These are great boons to those of us who want more, having been through everything else so often. Waugh's work is shocking and hilarious. I only wish he could return briefly and leave us something on the politically correct. But as that will surely not come to pass, I must say, that this volume is a great footnote, to the god of caustic disdain, to be read in bits and pieces- forever.

An assault on England's class structure?.......2000-12-09

I enjoyed this collection of Waugh's short stories and unfinished work. Cutting, indeed cruel at times, but always interesting, he zeroes in on the upper and upper middle classes of the interwar years. Cruelty can, in fact, be rather fun! I would say that if you haven't read any Waugh, this is a good starting point.

Average customer rating:

Great Depiction of the Very Wealthy [74][80][T]
"Of course, there were also the corpses, dahling..."
A Book That Should Be Returned To Again and Again
Brideshead - Revisitations of an Adult Convert
Profound Passion.

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0316926345

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One of Waugh's most famous books, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. Taking place in the years after World War II, Brideshead Revisited shows us a part of upper-class English culture that has been disappearing steadily.

Customer Reviews:

Great Depiction of the Very Wealthy [74][80][T].......2007-03-24

Charles Ryder is the protagonist who we follow from his first days of Oxford through his marriage, divorce and potential engagement. Intertwined with each adventure is the family that owns Brideshead. He is best friends with a son of the owner, a debater of religion with another, and very fond of a daughter.

Ultimately becoming a famous artist of architectural designs which are victims to age or developers' ruin, he becomes famous for his architectural portraits of grand manors and other buildings which are destined for doom. He "preserves" their images with portraits which become plates in books sold to the public.

Like Ryder's paintings, Waugh's writing preserves much of upper class British society. His detailed dialogue infused with their jargon and repertoire is very different from 21st century America, and that is what is so very indelible about this book. Each person speaks as one could only imagine people "like that" did in "those times."

This book has many similarities to "Handful of Dust" - another Waugh classic - as each imports similar characters: a owner of a mansion, an untrue spouse, a British politician who hob nobs with the rich, a playboy, and the others who like fox hunting. But, this novel is more mature, more deep-rooted, more . . . everything.

Unquestionably, a great novel. This book may be the best of the people of Britain in that social scale during the 1920's-40's.

"Of course, there were also the corpses, dahling...".......2007-02-20

Rather a lot of people died rather horribly in the two World Wars. But to read Waugh's novel, you'd think that the greatest single tragedy these conflicts brought about was that his posh friends were deprived of their expensive houses.

Advice for aspiring novelists: if you're A) a genuinely gifted prose stylist, and B) an utterly repulsive specimen of humanity, it's best to steer away from writing thinly veiled autobiography.

Also, if you decide to ignore the above advice, don't try to exculpate yourself by twittering on about how you've Found Jesus.

A Book That Should Be Returned To Again and Again.......2006-09-29

There is little new to say of this book other than to mention what an excellent light it sheds on Waugh's other, very different books. Although dismissed by Waugh as the product of Spam and blackouts (wartime privations), Brideshead endures because of its superb structure, characterizations and ultimately heart. It is this last feature which gives evidence of the human depths that inform all of Waugh's novels even those whose satire keeps these depths at a clinical distance.

Brideshead - Revisitations of an Adult Convert .......2006-09-25

Evelyn Waugh's book "Brideshead Revisited" gives you that feeling of autumnal-university-literature-class heaviness that you crave from time to time. Like that piece of chocolate cake that you shyed away from the other day, it's something that is too dense and too heavy for you to eat hurriedly but something that you want to sit and take time with.

There are all of the usual literary forms in this book which employs memories of Post-WWI modernist progressivism framed by the mires of WWII meaninglessness. But Waugh isn't doing this simply for the want of honor and tradition that seem to have been lost to progress and get-'er-done type flunkies, he's (and yes, he is a "HE") doing it for your soul.

Evelyn Waugh was an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, and you can trace both his faith as well the memories of his wrestling against faith in this book. The book uses the protagonist of Charles Ryder to explore the lives and existential nature of the family that resides in the Brideshead mansion. It is a look into human nature as it wrestles with all sorts of things, and especially as it wrestles with faith.

The book is one of the many that are lumped into the "hound of heaven" category. Over and over in the book, we see that no matter how far astray or how morally and ethically objectionable people are - God's grace seeks after them and brings them back with a twitch upon the thread that connects them to God.

Although the book isn't overtly Christian, the Christian reader can certainly enjoy a deeper level of significance. The non-Christian can also enjoy the book, especially the look into the Christian life that shows that even Christians aren't ever perfect, nor do they need to be - they know a hound of heaven who is.

Profound Passion........2006-09-04

Told mostly in a long continuous flashback by Captain Charles Ryder during WWII, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is a novel about sin and grace and the fall of the English aristocracy. The novel is divided into two parts. The first section deals with Ryder and his friendship with Sebastian Flyte. At the beginning of the novel, Capt. Ryder and his troops arrive at Brideshead, an English manor and estate that Ryder stayed in throughout his college days and youth after WWI. Brideshead was Sebastian's former home. This part of the novel deals with Charles relationship with Sebastian and how Sebastian's family came to "adopt" Charles into their strange little world.

The second section of the novel begins years later and deals with the romantic relationship between Charles and Sebastian's sister, Julia. At this point, Charles is a semi-famous artist who is married with children. During a chance encounter aboard a ship returning to England, Charles and Julia meet again. Married to people that neither loves, they soon begin an affair and contemplate divorcing their spouses and starting a new life. What follows is an emotional and spiritual struggle as Charles and Julia wrestle to find temperance between their love for each other and Truth.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is the first Evelyn Waugh story that I have ever read. I have been told that it is one of his best, if not his finest work. The novel is full of wit, local colour, and passion. It contains beautiful descriptive passages that at times I read several times over just because it was written so well.

Nevertheless, Waugh has a very unique style. At times the reading is demanding at other times it was frustrating because I could sense condescension emitting from the pages. At times this tone caught me off guard and caused me to distance myself from the piece. There are many readers who just can't read a novel like this very well or if they can, they won't enjoy. Even though I wouldn't say it's one of the best books I've ever read, I did, however, enjoy the book. It is a novel filled with tragedies and triumphs. It is a novel about life, love, and loss. It is a novel about sin and grace and ultimately understanding and redemption. "No one is ever holy without suffering."

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Horrifying & Brilliant
Fall of an aristocrat
Not the best.
Scathing Waugh
What Is Left After A Handful of Dust?

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Decline and Fall
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The Loved One

ASIN: 0316926051

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"All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent."

Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as Evelyn Waugh, who employed the conventions of the comic novel to chip away at the already crumbling English class system. His 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, is a sublime example of his bleak satirical style: a mordantly funny exposé of aristocratic decadence and ennui in England between the wars.

Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. In the first half of the novel Waugh fearlessly anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Everyone moves through an endless cycle of parties and country-house weekends, being scrupulously polite in public and utterly horrid in private. Sex is something one does to relieve the boredom, and Brenda's affair provides a welcome subject for conversation: <blockquote> It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. </blockquote> Tony's indifference and Brenda's selfishness give their relationship a sort of equilibrium until tragedy forces them to face facts. The collapse of their relationship accelerates, and in the famous final section of the book Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado, throwing himself on the mercy of a jungle only slightly more savage than the one he leaves behind in England. For all its biting wit, A Handful of Dust paints a bleak picture of the English upper classes, reaching beyond satire toward a very modern sense of despair. In Waugh's world, culture, breeding, and the trappings of civilization only provide more subtle means of destruction. --Simon Leake

Book Description

A HANDFUL OF DUST satirizes that stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom and becomes enamored of a social parasite and professional lunch-goer.

The depravity and polished savagery of these characters offer an opportunity for Waugh's rapier wit and subtly to "show us fear in a handful of dust."

"Waugh's technique is relentless and razor-edged...by any standard it is super satire." (Chicago Daily News)

Customer Reviews:

Horrifying & Brilliant.......2007-05-11

A Handful of Dust has to be one of the most disturbing books I have read. Waugh's satire is incisive and merciless. Calling this work "tragicomedy" is misleading. While comedic in the early stages of the novel, the dark subject matter ultimately dominates and subdues any elements of humor.

Waugh paints too convincing of a picture of the empty and meaningless world of the aristocracy of England between the Wars. Another reviewer brought up a comparison of PJ Wodehouse - honestly I never would have made any connection between the entertaining farce of Wodehouse and the stark portrayal by Waugh. Where Wodehouse is good-natured, Waugh is pitiless. But therein lies the difference between the two authors, for Wodehouse is just entertainment. Waugh forced me to look under the cover of the seemingly apathetic or depraved aristocracy to see how good manners and money mask a vile depravity that consumed the souls of its victims.

In some respects, the portrait is not too different from that of the Dedlocks and their social circle portrayed in Dickens' Bleak House - a self-important, detached cultural elite that is effectively preyed upon by an outer ring of semi-noble and mercantile parasites. But where Dickens allows even the vapid Lord Dedlock a core of nobility, Waugh denies nobility to all his characters. It is not just shocking to middle-class sensibilities, but to human sensibilities.

Ultimately it's a novel that I'm glad I read, but I will never be able to read again. This is unfortunate, particularly because I invested in this fine Everman's Library edition rather than a disposable paperback.

Fall of an aristocrat.......2006-09-20

Yes, a bleak picture of a decaying world. "Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy..."--or between satire and tragedy--as well as Waugh. For all of Tony Last's faults, however, he is the more sympathetic character. His wife comes across as decidedly immature and amoral. Interesting portrayal of religion in this novel: the Church of England is already marginalized, of questionable relevance. Indeed, the whole life of prayer and sacraments seems to make no sense to the main characters, who of course are all nominal Anglicans. Last himself is a church-attender. This was, of course, before the era of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer--and the general revival of religion in Britain and America after the Second World War. A solid, important novel--sad, though, and, yes, bleak.

Not the best........2006-09-11

Don't go into this or any other Waugh novel expecting Wodehouse or you'll be extremely disapointed. They write about the same people, in a similar style, and in the same period. Waugh just falls short. Despite all the reviews to the contrary Waugh just doesn't measure up. If you're interested in this type of writing I recomend skipping this one alone and picking up another Jeeves and Wooster story.

Scathing Waugh.......2006-09-08

Here Evelyn Waugh savagely satirizes an English couple who "play" at assuming wealth and status. Tony Last imagines (goes through the motions) of being a country squire at his feudal estate Hetton Abbey; he becomes so enamored in this that he fails to notice that his totally bored wife Brenda is having an affair with the vacuous John Beaver. When he finally wakes up to the situation, Tony, unable to face it head on, flees England for the jungles of South America where he is eventually taken prisoner by a half-lunatic trader who forces him to read Dickens to him for the rest of his life.

Part farce (the scenes with Tony in South America) but mostly cutting satire, Waugh attacks those people who have the outward signs of good breeding but who lack any inner moral decency that would make them respectable members of society. Tony, like a child following the tenets of a romantic hero, does all the things he believes a country squire must do - only they are meaningless rituals and empty of any significance. Brenda's selfishness and lack of moral bearing are illustrated with her abandoning Tony for the unscrupulous wastrel Beaver. The most biting attack on her character occurs when she hears that "John" has been killed; when she realizes the name refers to her own son and not to John Beaver, she is relieved and takes it as proof of her love for Beaver. Waugh also attacks the English divorce system, which results in a scathingly funny scene involving another woman planted in Tony's bed to "prove" infidelity. Waugh's satirical barbs are leveled with gentle and impassive blows, which only add to their effect. It's a masterful performance, a funny and devastating novel.

What Is Left After A Handful of Dust?.......2006-08-12

In A HANDFUL OF DUST, Evelyn Waugh continues to poke at the rotten underside of British upper class immorality with some very sharp barbs, not all of which are satiric. With the publication of this book, Waugh was already well known as a man whose themes could not hide a bitter sense of despair that all was not right with post war Edwardian England. In DECLINE AND FALL and VILE BODIES, Waugh showed himself full of despair that England had lost its moral way, if not its moral compass. But with A HANDFUL OF DUST, he adds to this an anger towards unfaithful wives that is disturbing to read.

The novel begins, as so many of Waugh's other works, with a feckless young man who seems content to drift in life. Here it is John Beaver, who begins a friendship with Tony Last, a man who seems mired in the roots of his Victorian forebears. Last has a mansion that he prizes above all else, even over his lovely, but bored wife, Brenda. When Last invites Beaver to stay for a visit at his house, Brenda sees in Beaver an opportunity to cure her boredom. She quickly seduces Last. For the first half of the book, Waugh is content to play out the seeming harmlessness of the affair. Waugh's wit and satire are strangely muted, only because he uses Last, Beaver, and Brenda as ready targets as symbols for all that he saw as wrong with a jaded and irrelevant British upper class. However, in the second half, with the death of Brenda's young son in a riding accident, Waugh sharpens his bite so that what he writes is less satire than a howl of existential bile both at a cuckold who refuses to see what is right in front of his nose and at a wife and mother who cares less about the fate of her dead son and more about continuing her affair. Such bitterness had been lacking in his earlier novels. By the end of the novel, Waugh returns to his previous level of acrimony with the weird fate of Tony Last who is doomed to recite the novels of Charles Dickens to a madman in a Brazilian jungle.

The reader feels a conflict with the inharmonious flow of satire and irony. Waugh lambasts an entire generation of Bright Young Things, none of whom are as bright as they imagine, but all are doomed to play out their lives in a universe devoid of meaning. A fitting end is the endless repetition of Dickens sounding and resounding in some tiny mudball of a hut for the gratification of a lunatic who may be more sane than most of the novel's other characters. This formless buzzing of noise is what is left after a handful of dust disappears in the breeze.

The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Everyman's Library)

Average customer rating:

the best novels of world war 2
A Good Man in World War II
Plummy fun
Five stars for Waugh, 0 stars for Everyman's Library
Worthy of the Victoria Cross

The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Everyman's Library)
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

Brideshead Revisited (Everyman's Library)
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
A Handful of Dust
Helena (Loyola Classics)
Decline and Fall

ASIN: 0679431365
Release Date: 1994-05-10

Book Description

This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often somber, the Sword of Honour trilogy is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh’s early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric.

Customer Reviews:

the best novels of world war 2.......2007-03-08

The best of Evelyn Waugh works, this trilogy is the perfect combination of story and history. Waugh's actual experience during the war leaves its mark all over the place, as well as his particular brand of humor - and his distaste for communism. Great read for anyone who wants to be entertained by a touching story, and see how the war was fought by the British, and why they turned against Churchill when it was won. Even if you don't care about any of that, the jokes are still fantastic, and most of the characters are brilliantly developed. They don't make novels like these ones anymore.

A Good Man in World War II .......2005-10-06

Guy Crouchback is almost saintly. He is Catholic, patriotic, and selfless. When World War II comes along he is eager to serve his country and to be thrown into the caldron of war. But, by his own admission, he is not "simpatico" and he always seems to be the square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Perhaps his military career parallels that of the author, Evelyn Waugh.

There is of course no place for Guy in the British Army where his hard work and dedication are little rewarded and his war experiences are spotted with malfortune, little of which is of his own making. Guy "blots his copy book" early on and ends up being suspected of spying for the Italians. Waugh dots this novel with a cast of clownish characters and comic adventures in which Guy sadly participates.

Waugh's irreverent attitude toward World War II has probably made this novel less popular than it should have been. For example, at the opening of the war, Crouchback wonders why England, in the face of simultaneous invasions of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, chose to go to war with one and not the other. At another point, Guy muses that "he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue." In the best Waughian tradition, he does a hatchet job on the much-celebrated Yugoslav resistance movement of Marshall Tito.

Waugh, oddly enough, has also made the interesting comment that he wrote the "obituary" of the Roman Catholic Church in England with this novel. I take him at his word although perhaps I can't fully appreciate the Catholic subtleties of the novel.

Waugh originally published this novel in three volumes between 1952 and 1962. He then published the three volumes in one, omitting "tedious" passages. One of the tedious passages he omitted was, to me, the most memorable of the book -- the tale of children evacuated from London at the beginning of the war and thrust, with hilarious consequences, upon the country gentry for caretaking. So, you might read the novels -- Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle -- separately as well as together.

Beyond thrillers, World War II doesn't seem to have inspired a lot of good novels. Waugh's comic, sad, and cynical novel is one of the best.

Smallchief

Plummy fun.......2004-11-28

Great fun. The sort of thing that you read in the study with an open fire, a glass of 10 year old port and a cigar smouldering in the ashtray, the Great Dane snoring in the corner next to the mahogany sideboard.

Or that's the image that the book throws up.

I really enjoyed the book, wit in bucketfuls with an irony and a poignancy that had me chuckling away in time to the Great Danes' snoring.

Waugh takes you to the world of officers and gentlemen that he obviously experienced during his own wartime service- the injustice, the inept leadership and the crazed bravado of some of those around him. The waiting, the rumour, the boredom, the politics and luck, both good and bad are all major players in this book. The class system of officers and privates- all of the ingredients that make a Waugh book are here.

Oh yeah: and he fully describes and realises the insignificance of one soldier in the great scheme of things in an army, no matter how hard that one man wants to make a real difference.

Watch out for the exploits of the great Richie Hook- comic relief and so incredibly un-PC it will make you winch and laugh at the same time

Five stars for Waugh, 0 stars for Everyman's Library.......2004-11-13

Though "Brideshead Revisited" may be his best known work, nothing conveys Waugh's sense of the world better than "The Sword of Honour" trilogy.

His sacramental view of earthly reality is best expressed in a memorable exchange between Guy Crouchback, the book's protagonist, and an obviously overwhelmed Anglican minister.

"... Do you agree," [Guy] asked earnestly, "that the Supernatural Order is not something added to the Natural Order, like music or painting, to make everday life more tolerable? It is everyday life. The supernatural is real; what we call 'real' is a mere shadow, a passing fancy. Don't you agree, Padre?"

"Up to a point." [said the Padre]

Sadly, Alfred A. Knopf's Everyman's Library, a collection of books intended to preserve and popularize the classics of modern literature, isn't up to the task. The binding is stiff and cheap, and the gold embossed lettering on the cover literally disintegrates in your hands. I bought this book hoping it would last a lifetime, but I'll be lucky if it survives the coming year.

Read Waugh for the tonic that he is, but avoid the Everyman's Library like the publishing plague that it is.

Worthy of the Victoria Cross.......2004-02-02

When these books came out a number of reviewers thought that Waugh had lost his touch. Perhaps the atmosphere of the swinging sixties did not lend to itself a real understanding of the greatness of this work. In my opinion this work represents one of Waugh's major works. While it does not cover every aspect of World War Two (Proust did not feel the need to fight out every battle of World War One either), it does provide a kind of summing up of the state of Britain and what happened to former ruling class, a body that provoked feelings of great affinity from Waugh, even though he was a product of the upper middle class.

The key to understanding Waugh, not just this book, but also all of the others is his distrust of the 20th century. He came of age during the 1920s and biographers have noted an early fascination with the pre-Raphaelites. Although this artistic brotherhood focused on life in the pre-industrial age Waugh the satirist brought his powers to bear on the post World War I modern world its mores and hypocrasies. World War Two brought high taxes and democracy to this admired world of the British gentry and Waugh correctly chronicles this in his summary of the war in the trilogy.
The book is also a wonderful social satire drawing portraits of many of Waugh's own circle including Diana Mosley (With the fascist sympathies air brushed out here) Cyril Connolly and others. He marks the fall of the aristocratic officer and the rise of the "Trimmers" of the world whose heroism is more a result of luck and press puffing than genuine achievement.
The turning point in the book is the Crete campaign. Here British high born leadership collapses finally. Waugh sees this military failure coupled with the subsequent alliance with Bolshevik Russia to be one of the failures of the war. The so-called "Stalingrad sword" which appears as a character in its own right is symbollic of the passing away of the former way of life. It is not surprising that Waugh kills off the saintly Mr. Couchback (the hero's father) at this point in the book to provide a last hurrah for the old Catholic landed gentry.

The book is replete with a full gallary of comic characters. My favorite Apthorpe is unfortunately killed off in the first novel. To detail the reasons would be to deprive future of readers of the genuine pleasure in encountering him in the novels. However despite this absence in the two subsequent volumes, there are plenty to keep one amused. My second favorite of Virginia Troy, who is the ex-wife of our hero, Guy Crouchback. It is entertaining to watch this very worldly woman make her way through war-time Britain. There is Ludovic, the aspirant writer, enlisted man and probably the personification of the future post-war world with his trite novel "The Death Wish." Finally there is Trimmer, a former barber who becomes a hero because Britain needed one who was working class (at least in the opinion of HO HQ).

This is a major work by Waugh and probably his best book after "A Handful of Dust." In many ways it is superior to the earlier masterpiece in that provides Waugh with a wider canvas to express himself. This is a must for all readers of Waugh.

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Waugh's farce about the newspaper trade and making a name for oneself
Is it a comedy if you don't laugh out loud?
Clever
Brilliant Wit From the Inimitable Waugh
Stop the presses

Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0316926108

Amazon.com

Evelyn Waugh was one of literature's great curmudgeons and a scathingly funny satirist. Scoop is a comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s and the story of William Boot, a innocent hick from the country who writes careful essays about the habits of the badger. Through a series of accidents and mistaken identity, Boot is hired as a war correspondent for a Fleet Street newspaper. The uncomprehending Boot is sent to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover an expected revolution. Although he has no idea what he is doing and he can't understand the incomprehensible telegrams from his London editors, Boot eventually gets the big story.

Book Description

In SCOOP, surreptitiously dubbed a "newspaper adventure," Evelyn Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war correspondents. He tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism and how, leaving the part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaeilia to London as the Daily Beast's most accoladed overseas reporter.

"With this book England's wittiest novelist sets a new standard for comic extravaganza...the real message about SCOOP is that it is thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny and that everyone should read it at once." (The New York Times)

"...a good deal of sharp wit--you can cut your hands on it if you're not careful." (The New Yorker)

Customer Reviews:

Waugh's farce about the newspaper trade and making a name for oneself.......2006-05-27

Evelyn Waugh's send-up of the newspaper business, and where in other novels he could be bitterly satirical, here he's wildly farcical and broadly comical. William Boot, a nature writer for the DAILY BEAST, ("Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" is given as an example of his "high-class style" of writing), is mistaken for the novelist John Boot and is sent to the African country of Ishmaelia. Here he encounters other journalists, many of them American, who are all looking for the scoop that will make them famous. Boot meets and falls in love with a woman named Kachen, and immediately the naïve Boot is in over his head romantically. But it's she who slips Boot the news about a planned coup d'etat, and the simple-minded journalist scoops everyone and eventually comes home a hero. Of course the wrong Boot (John) is given knighthood and the book ends, after additional mistaken identities are made, with everything being righted and Boot (William) going back to writing his innocuous nature articles, none the worse (or better) for wear. Waugh's humor is bright and airy, very reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse, who is actually alluded to at one point in the story. Lots and lots of laughs from beginning to end.

Is it a comedy if you don't laugh out loud?.......2005-09-02

Funny, but only in a clever way, not in a ha-ha way.

I laugh out loud while reading Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Carl Hiaasen and Paul Theroux.

This just made me smile thinly and sardonically.

Not that there is anything wrong with that...

Clever.......2005-05-07

Overall, a very satisfying read, but somewhat disjointed. The beginning and ending -- the two parts which take place at Boot Magna in the English countryside -- are laugh-out-loud funny. The middle section, which takes place with the protaganist, William Boot, in the mythical African nation of Ishmaelia, is more straightforward and serious. The portions of the book which chronicle Boot's relationship with Katchen felt like they were torn out of a Hemingway book, given the sparse dialog and direct emotions. I felt as if this book might have been started by a very young, impressionable Waugh during a time when he was experimenting with different styles, trying to find the one which best suited him... styles borrowed from Hemingway, Wodehouse, and Greene. Its slightly disjointed nature made me think that it was a book which he worked on in fits and starts... would write a little, put it back in the drawer, revisit it a couple of months later. Overall, it's a very good book by a writer a few years away from his peak.

Brilliant Wit From the Inimitable Waugh.......2005-04-26

Yes, I'd be bold enough to name Evelyn Waugh as one of the world's greatest writers, a true genius when the word actually meant something (it's handed out too freely nowadays!); we shall likely never see his match again. "Scoop" is not only hilarious (I laughed out loud quite often), but the satire is as timely as it ever was. He is a keen observer of human beings and his depiction of the disorderly East African government and the Fleet Street news agency so given to politically motivated perks that a trick cyclist had been engaged to edit the Sports Page on a five year contract is spot on. All of the absurdity is wonderful. An absolute delight.

Stop the presses.......2004-08-18

Call William Boot the Forrest Gump of the 1930s: oblivious to the process he is a part of, he continually finds himself in the right place at the right time, blindly stumbling onto the Big Story that made him a reluctant hero.

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh -- one of the most famous curmudgeons of English literature -- produces an enjoyable and easy-to-read satire that will recall the novels of P.G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene's lighter efforts. In the book, Mr. Waugh points his razor wit toward the media, royalty, politics, warfare, and travel, all in the context of a fictional and fanciful war in the made-up Republic of Ishmaelia that is based on Italy's ill-fated war in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), which Mr. Waugh himself covered as a young reporter.

His sharpest barbs are saved for his one-time profession, which he paints as being populated by lazy and back-stabbing prima donnas incapable of independent thought and more interested in style -- or at least the appearance of style -- than in substance. The bland Boot, the story's protagonist who is a decent enough fellow but a hopeless journalist, manages to get far closer to the truth than any of his colleagues but does so only by chance.

Though the attitudes, language, and practices described in Scoop are more than a little dated, there is an element of truth in the picture Mr. Waugh paints of the Fourth Estate (as sad cases like the contemporary one involving one-time New York Times rising star Jayson Blair remind us). The descriptions are, however, greatly exaggerated: it is impossible to imagine a time when writers were sent into the field so poorly prepared, with unlimited expense accounts, and rewarded for sending in cryptic messages that are somehow turned into massive front-page reports. There is a slight element of sour grapes in Mr. Waugh's description of the newsgathering field he failed to excel in, something most obvious from the names he chooses for the fictional newspapers in the story (The Daily Beast, The Daily Brute, etc.).

More importantly, like most popular satires, Scoop is really less about its subject matter than about comforting those who don't move in the same circles as the rich and powerful the book dismantles between its covers -- remember that these are the same people who were expected to buy this book when it was published in 1938. Even critics at that time recognized this in an as-a-matter-of-fact way, referring to Scoop as a comedy of errors Mr. Waugh dashed off to pay the bills between more weighty projects.

But the most serious flaw of the book concerns the way the main character, Boot, evolves ... or fails to evolve. Characters are the cornerstone of any great story and even with a farce like Scoop (compare Boot to the bumbling Wormold in Mr. Greene's Our Man in Havana, another satire produced by a serious writer on a lark) the story is dramatically improved by illustrating the evolution of characters over the length of the narrative. But in Scoop, Boot returns home just the same as when he left. All of the characters, in fact, fail to change at all during the course of the story, with the possible exception of the compelling and shadowy Russian/Hungarian/Pole cum German love interest, Kätchen -- not the best possible work from an author known for producing noteworthy personalities in his more noteworthy novels like Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited.

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Great book
Drags a bit, but it is a good read.
"a progress toward the cross"
Truly a prize winning book!

Edmund Campion
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Ignatius Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1586170430

Book Description

Evelyn Waugh presented his biography of St. Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan poet, scholar and gentleman who became the haunted, trapped and murdered priest as "a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness."

It is written with a novelist's eye for the telling incident and with all the elegance and feeling of a master of English prose. From the years of success as an Oxford scholar, to entry into the newly founded Society of Jesus and a professorship in Prague, Campion's life was an inexorable progress towards the doomed mission to England. There followed pursuit, betrayal, a spirited defense of loyalty to the Queen, and a horrifying martyr's death at Tyburn.

Customer Reviews:

Great book.......2007-06-21

It is always good to read about the saints, but the writing of those who write on the saints is not always good. It is no surprise that one of the great writers of the last century such as Evelyn Waugh would turn out a great book.

Edmund Campion is a biography of the Jesuit Saint Edmund Campion who was martyred in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the increasingly severe penal laws in England. This book was written in 1935 only five years after Waugh's conversion into the Catholic Church. It is a straightforward biography based on the best historical research available at the time. The author does not inject himself in the book in that he tries hard to stick to the historical narrative of what can actually be known and any dialogue in the book is straight from the historical record. This is in no way some syrupy hagiography that diverges from facts with flowery stories or that tries to inflate the actions of Edmund Campion. Though considering the subject this is not much needed when you look at his amazing life.

The book running at a little more than 200 pages is divided into four very appropriate chapters: The Scholar, The Priest, The Hero, The Martyr. I wonder if you have to give a spoiler alert when you are talking a martyr. Evelyn Waugh provides the necessary historical background of the state of the Church and of the politics involved and you fast become involved in the biography as if you were reading a novel. Every time you read about the recusants and those in Church history who were persecuted for the faith it always gives you a greater appreciation of what most Catholics in the modern world take for granted. When we go to Mass we aren't worried that somebody is going to turn us in or that we don't need guards to warn is people are coming so that the priest can hide in the priest-hole.

The first two chapters deal with his academic life and his early career as he initially leaves England because of the growing persecution of Catholics and his decision to become a priest and then a Jesuit. The biographic then moves to his returning to England. Like many saints he was not specifically making decisions that would lead him on the road to martyrdom. In fact circumstances could have left him teaching in Vienna and Prague since the Jesuits at the time had no chapters in England. But also like many saints when it became apparent that he would indeed be traveling down that road it was done with joy.

As Waugh chronicles Campion's year of attending to the Catholics in England you again get caught up in the drama as he and other priests continue to minister to the flock for the good of souls. It is a measure of Campion's genius that his "Brag" that he wrote in a half-hour's time to defend himself from charges of treason was printed and reprinted across England. Or that his famous Ten Reasons would provide much annoyance to the authorities at the time. So annoying that once he was captured and tortured they brought him to a series of debates to try to counter it. Waugh does not dwell much into St. Campion's grisly martyrdom that will be familiar to those that saw Braveheart, but it is quite interesting the stories he describes by those who were converted by Campion in his last days.

Highly recommended and one of those rare biographies that is indeed a page-turner.

Drags a bit, but it is a good read........2007-01-05

Drags a bit, but it is a good read overall.

"a progress toward the cross".......2005-09-21

"My charge is, of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reforme sinners, to confute errors-- in brief, to crie alarme spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance wherewith many my dear Countrymen are abused.

I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I do gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts."

-- the courageous martyr and "seditious Jesuit" Edmund Campion in his famous "Brag"

Kudos to the good people of Ignatius Press for introducing new generations to Waugh's masterful biography of St. Edmund Campion. The brilliant Oxford scholar was destined for any career he chose in Elizabeth's Protestant England. Instead, at a time when being Catholic meant persecution and an uncertain future, Campion chose not only conversion, but ordination as a Jesuit and near-certain death.

Ignatius' new hardcover edition is superbly done, with a tight binding, attractive dust jacket, high quality paper, and a very readable font. It also includes remarks by modern Waugh aficionados like Joseph Pearce and George Weigel and a new introduction by Fr. Joseph Fessio.

Readers might enjoy excerpts from Percy Hutchison's 1936 review in the New York Times:

"For several years Campion, of the Jesuit order and ordained priest, had been on the Continent. Then Rome ordered him to England to give what mental and religious sustenance he could to the persecuted brethren. Though he knew that sooner or later his life would be forfeit, Campion, ten years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, landed once again on English soil. From that moment on his days might fittingly be described as a progress toward the cross.

He was a marked man. Doubtless it is true, as Evelyn Waugh adduces documentary evidence to show, that Campion was falsely convicted. He was charged with sedition; he had incited no rebellion. He was charged with treason; he had not committed treason. But he had given heart to the English of his faith by surreptitious preaching and surreptitious administrations of the sacraments. At his trial a great show of disputation of doctrine was made, but all this, according to Mr. Waugh, was camouflage."

Truly a prize winning book!.......2002-09-20

This biography of the English saint and martyr Edmund Campion won the Hawthornden Prize in 1936, and I read it because of that. It is very well-written , tho it lacks a bibliography and footnotes. Campion was executed Dec. 1, 1581, after being sentenced to "be hanged and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight, then your head to be cut off and your body divided into four parts." It surely makes one grateful for the 8th Amendment against cruel and unusual punishmnet. This is a fast read and eminently worth reading.

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)

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Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Decline and Fall

ASIN: 1400040779
Release Date: 2003-08-05

Book Description

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, four of the master’s most wickedly scathing comedies are here brought together in one volume.

Black Mischief is Waugh at his most mischievous–inventing a politically loopy African state as a means of pulverizing politics at home. In Scoop, it is journalism’s turn to be drawn and quartered. The Loved One (which became a famously hilarious film) sends up the California mortuary business. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a burst of fictionalized autobiography in which Pinfold goes mad, more or less, on board an ocean liner.

Here in four short–very different–novels are the mordant wit, inspired farce, snapping dialogue, and amazing characters that are the essence of everything Waugh ever wrote.

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The sad story of Paul Pennyfeather
"Monty Python" for People Who Think
The Decline of an Empire & The Fall of Morality
Deliciously scathing
Where Do I Fit In?

Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Black Mischief

ASIN: 0316926078

Book Description

1928. English writer, regarded by many as the leading satirical novelist of his day. Among Waugh's most popular books is Brideshead Revisited. Waugh established his literary reputation with this novel, Decline and Fall, an episodic story of the hilarious misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, whose feckless odyssey begins when he loses his trousers. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Customer Reviews:

The sad story of Paul Pennyfeather.......2007-01-16

This bitter farce tells the story of one Paul Pennyfeather, a young man who is expelled from an Oxford-like university due to a misunderstanding. Ever since this first scene the reader understands that he's reading a novel of the absurd. The point is never to tell a credible story with a tight plot, but to develop a savage satire on the British society, especially the educational system. After being expelled, Paul finds himself with no money and so is forced to get a job at a school of the worst level. His colleagues are pathetic and their small misadventures are hilarious. Of course, Waugh's humor is very British: caustic, understated, and at the same time some passages, like the athletic event, are excessive to the point of ridicule. At some point, Paul makes the acquaintance of the mother of one of his pupils, a rich and beautiful widow who proposes to him in marriage. This seems to be Paul's lucky break of a lifetime, and he eagerly accepts. But the woman runs a strange business which will produce the decline and fall of the title.

What develops as a hilarious farce ends up being a sad story. Waugh aims his mockery at every person and system included in the novel. Education, prostitution, jail, politics and business are all the target of this first novel which promises much about the future work of Waugh. Recommended.

"Monty Python" for People Who Think.......2006-08-20

Waugh's notorious first novel, "Decline and Fall" brutally satirizes British society of the 1920s with his characteristic black humor. Based in part, upon his own experiences at Oxford and teaching at a private school in Wales in 1925, it lays waste British notions of honor, educational excellence, sportsmanship, the Church, and the upper class generally. In an age when most "humor" is visual slapstick, it is refreshing to read a writer who could be screamingly funny using words alone.

Readers with Politically Correct views, will probably be offended by this book (or any of Waugh's other novels for that matter), but those who believe that the only test of humor is whether or not it is funny will find it an enjoyable read.

Note: The movie version of another great satire by Waugh, "The Loved One," has only recently been released on DVD. With a screenplay by Terry Southern (who also wrote the screenplay for "Dr. Strangelove"), it is definitely worth buying, although you will enjoy it more if you read the book first. It is one of those rare films that does the book justice.

The Decline of an Empire & The Fall of Morality.......2006-08-12

When the First World War ended in 1918, Evelyn Waugh was fifteen years old. Over the next decade, he saw a continuation of the wrenching that England had suffered first on a material level, then on a moral and social one. In DECLINE AND FALL, Waugh expresses his dismay that the psychic underpinning that had bolstered England for the fighting proved incapable to lead it in the years that led to the Great Depression. Everywhere Waugh looked, he saw a gradual disintegration of the English social fabric, and for him, this fraying of that fabric allowed him to use his new found sense of biting satire that could lash out in all directions.

DECLINE AND FALL (1926) was Waugh's first novel. His protagonist Paul Pennyfeather is the contemporary English Everyman, a basically decent sort of chap who seeks to do the right thing, but finds out that all too often that he is the only one interested in doing that. Pennyfeather's approach to life is a passive one. When dire events happen, he tries harder to deflect their severity than to eradicate them altogether. The opening chapter sets the tone for his inability to confront dire evil with purposeful resolve. He is a student at Scone University who is subject to a mean trick by a group of consciousless upperclass cads, the result of which is that he is expelled for moral turpitude. Rather than fight to stay in school he meekly accepts his fate. From this point on, the novel descends into a series of events whose reverberations and ripples drag him ever more deeply into the muck and slime of existential disarray. He finds a job teaching vicious urchins at a tenth rate school, where he predictably encounters both students and teachers whose only purpose is to bedevil him. Eventually, he meets a woman who promises to be the Great Love of his life. She unwittingly involves him a white slavery deal that results in his imprisonment. By the time the novel ends, Pennyfeather has gone in a big circle. He returns to Scone University in a disguise (he needs one since he escaped from prison), but this disguise is external only. Inwardly, he is the same passive but good hearted naive youth that he was in the beginning.

DECLINE AND FALL proved to be the first in a series of novels that allowed Waugh to explore the bitter angst that bubbled beneath the surface in an English middle class society that increasingly came to see itself as having lost its moral compass in an age that prized breaking the rules over following them. As with all good writers, Waugh depicts a society that draws the reader inwardly, all the while urging that reader to judge the worth of that society as viewed through the bitterly satiric lens of a man who wants his reading public to feel the same sense of outrage that he does. In DECLINE AND FALL, Waugh succeeds admirably.

Deliciously scathing.......2006-08-10

In this his first novel, Evelyn Waugh lampoons the English education system, sporting events, theological study, the landed gentry, and prison reform, to name just some of the targets of his razor-sharp satirical barbs. Paul Pennyfeather, a third-year divinity student at Scone College, is kicked out after a prank is pulled on him leaving him indecently exposed; he then gets a job as a teacher in a prep school where his past is ignored ("I have been in the scholastic profession long enough," says the school's head Dr. Fagan, "to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal."). From there the craziness only multiplies: a student is accidentally shot in the foot with a starter's gun at a track meet (and dies); Pennyfeather gets involved with the debauched Margot Beste-Chetwynde and goes to prison in her place as a white slave-trader (the truly insane practices of the prison seem right out of a Marx Brothers movie); he is somehow legally declared dead on an operating table in prison where he was to have his already-removed appendix taken out; and then miraculously finds himself back at Scone none the worse for wear.

As I read the book I was reminded often of ALICE IN WONDERLAND: the Caucus race and the track meet, the nonsense poems in both, the "reforms" that are worse than the problems they are addressing, the return to "normalcy" at the end as if nothing of consequence ever happened. Waugh's satire is biting and very, very funny, but never excessively cruel or mean. One begins laughing while reading this novel right on the first page (the party scene is hilarious in its destructive foolishness, "a lovely evening") and continues to do so with few interruptions to the end. It's scathing, brilliant comedy - something Waugh was a master at.

Where Do I Fit In?.......2006-07-23

"Decline and Fall" is the ninth book by Evelyn Waugh that I have read. There were times, during these nine books, when I wondered what the heck I was reading and why. Waugh's style of writing makes his books enjoyable to read but I don't always come away clear on what it was that he wrote. He's the sort of author that can make you feel like you've just read a powerful drama only to discover how the critics loved the book's hilarious satire. In the case of "Decline and Fall", I kept looking for a theme to the book; a reason that the author would have written it. I confess to laughing at time at the many satirical passages and the impossible situations that his characters fall into. Still, I kept thinking I was ambling down a directionless path. In time I was able to satisfy my need for a theme.

I came to understand "Decline and Fall" as a comment on where do we each fit in and once we find that place in society, what does it really matter. Our "hero", Paul Pennyfeather, starts out with an uncomfortable fit with the upper class, moves into a reasonable middle class position and then finds himself in a largely lower class position. At every level, there are enough eccentrics to leave us wondering if anybody has a grip on reality. Towards the very end of the book, there's a brief comparison of life to a gravitational carnival ride; only those at the center have either the time or perspective to see things for what they are. Paul Pennyfeather's problem was that he was always surrounded by those in the process of falling off.

I feel better having found a purpose in "Decline and Fall". I was tempted to rate the book a "3" and would have without the strong ending that it had. It's funny and it's easily read but, I confess, I must have missed something because I don't see "5 stars" in this book.

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Delightful!!
Classic Waugh
The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh Takes No Prisoners
Before "Six Feet Under" there was "The Loved One"

The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0316926086

Amazon.com

The prolific Waugh--an English novelist and satirist perhaps best known for Brideshead Revisited--described this slim, vicious comedy as "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." The setting is the L.A. funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. (At Whispering Glades, staff must refer to the corpses only as "Loved Ones.") The industry provides a perfect foil for Waugh's deadpan wit--and an apt metaphor for the movie business.

Book Description

In Hollywood, at Whispering Glades, a full-service funeral home for departed greats, the mononymonous Mr. Joyboy and Aimee Thanatogenos fall in love...with each other and their work. He is chief embalmer, she a crematorium cosmetician. They spend their days contentedly prepping the loved ones for a final appearance.

Into this idyllic scene comes Denis Barlow, aspiring poet and funerary colleague. But Denis is downscale, his employer the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery. Denis looks to Aimee for professional reconstruction, falls in love with her instead, and sets up a triangle that is literally more than Aimee can bear.

"A fiendishly entertaining book -- Evelyn Waugh has never written more brilliantly. Devilishly, impishly amusing." (The New York Times)

Customer Reviews:

Delightful!!.......2007-03-15

I've had this book on my shelves for years and re-read it yesterday. Found it delightful and laughed out loud at some things.

I was confused by the mention of "HAL" in the first sentence as given on this site. There is no one named Hal in the story. Then I saw the problem. I have a Vintage Books edition where the first words of a chapter are in caps. The last word of the first sentence is "HAD". Part of the letter D has been cut off as has part of an e at the end of the second line.

Back to the story. Descriptions of funeral homes for people and pets are so good. I loved the little notes that Dennis sent about pets being in heaven and wagging their tails.

Classic Waugh.......2007-01-18

The Loved One is classic Waugh. Thought provoking, rather irrevent and good for an afternoon's belly laugh. If you enjoyed The Loved One you will also enjoy "SCOOP" and "Black Mischief".

The Loved One.......2006-12-21

At Whispering Glades funeral home, Loved Ones is the term used to refer to the deceased. My Joyboy, a foolish, weak-willed embalmer, prepares the bodies for viewing by the Waiting Ones, the relatives and friends of the Loved Ones. Miss Aimýe Thanatogenos, the appropriately named make-up artist at Whispering Glades, is young, innocent and foolish. Mr Joyboy carefully composes the faces of the Loved Ones so that they smile for her when it is time to put their make-up on. Aimýe blushes and generally acts as though her head is made of air.

Dennis Barlow is a struggling poet and works as a pets' mortician. He has recently suffered the death of his uncle and house-mate, Sir Francis Hinsley, who committed suicide following his dismissal at a Hollywood studio. Barlow visits Whispering Glades, where Aimýe leads him through the funeral process. He is impressed, both with the young Aimýe, but also with the care and expense shown to the Loved Ones at Whispering Glades. It is a far height above the casual dumping into furnaces that makes up the majority of his own mortician's work.

Waugh writes with a cynical hand. At times, the text strays into near-parody, it is so caustic and contemptuous of the characters and situations presented. But there is enough wit and sharp insight to make the novel enjoyable. The dialogue in particular crackles, with sly British humour inserted alongside blatant parody of American language. Barlow is given the greatest lines - as a hopeful poet, he comes across as knowledgeable in the face of the grand American ignorance of poetry and culture, embodied subtlety within Aimýe, and more openly in the blubbering of Mr Joyboy. There is a sense that we are in on the joke with Barlow, which may prove uncomfortable for American readers, as the Americans in the novel are without fail stupid, greedy, shallow and uncultured.

The funeral industry is something that we shall all, in one way or another, come into contact with. One can only hope that it will be at a late stage in our life, but at places like Whispering Glades, children are cared for with as much loving attention as the elderly. Waugh's sharpest insight is showing the ways in which the bereaved are persuaded into outlaying huge amounts for their deceased relatives. Yes, an appropriate and tasteful funeral certainly provides closure and allows for a certain aesthetic and emotional sensibility at a difficult time, but there is no question that some of the grander options for funerals run to the excessive. Waugh captures this almost parasitic end of the industry successfully, with Whispering Glades providing services that range from ordinary all the way up to sarcophagi and private mausoleums.

Waugh's jokes tend to the subtle when it comes to dialogue, and the savage when it comes to plot. Clever lines are so smoothly inserted that an inattentive reader may miss them: 'We usually recommend the casked half-exposure for gentlemen because the legs never look so well.' But the larger parodies of plot are easier to spot. Throughout the novel, Aimýe is torn between her love for Barlow and her desire for career advancement through Mr Joyboy, which prompts her to write a series of purple letters to the Guru Brahmin, a conglomerate of 'two gloomy men and a bright young secretary', who share the workload of the Guru's newspaper column. Aimýe, of course, believes that the Guru is a wise man from India, one who is more than capable of helping her choose the right man. We know the joke's on her, but we are also able to raise the satire to a higher level, in realising that, while she helps relieve grieving relatives of their money, outside of work she is capable of being all but swindled by an imaginary Guru.

An easy criticism of the novel is that none of the characters are particularly likable. Aimýe is naive and hopelessly shallow, while Mr Joyboy is ridiculous and far too much of a mother's boy. Barlow is the most sympathetic of the characters, but only because we are amused by his caustic wit. Take that away, and he is as unappealing as the others. But the novel exists as a satire, not a character study, and it is there where it succeeds. The funeral industry is as ripe as any other for savaging, and Waugh more than rises to the challenge.

The ending to the novel is an incredibly neat fit. Too neat to be anything but contrived, though again, this works because of the novel's intention. The ending is foreshadowed on almost every page, and if that isn't enough, Aimýe's name gives the game away. While it does wrap up a little too neatly for Barlow, the novel ends in the way that a novel satirical of the funeral industry must. The Loved Ones is short, funny and very sharp.

Evelyn Waugh Takes No Prisoners.......2006-12-17

This marvelous satire looks at contemporary life in Hollywood and sees at its root the absence of a widely diffused, generally understood, high-minded code of manners. Instead, everybody or at best everybody's narrow tribe is its own carver. Consequently, and hilariously, we see installed in highest place the values of Whispering Glades, or those of the Happier Hunting Ground, or of the ungrateful Hollywood studio executives, or of the toadying British expat "community." To the gimlet-eyed Waugh, this rampant subjectivism is not true freedom but a kind of modern wandering in the dark. Such a dour vision, though, becomes the source for his high spirited, wonderfully heartless comedy.

Before "Six Feet Under" there was "The Loved One".......2006-07-01

In this brilliant little satirical novel, Evelyn Waugh takes on Hollywood, the British expatriate community in Los Angeles, the death care industry, romantic love, filial love, sexism (perhaps without knowing it), and American attitudes toward success, death, foreigners, art, their pets, suicide, morality, newspaper advice columns, and religion (both ancient and new-fangled). No tombstone goes unturned. Rather than summarize the plot, let me just say that the title of the book, which is an obvious reference to the standard funteral director's euphemism for a deceased person, actually takes on another meaning as well, especially as the two main male characters (Dennis Barlow, an British would-be poet newly arrived to Los Angeles, and Mr. Joyboy, a successful local embalmer) vie for the affections of the same young lady, Aimee Thanatogenos. The novel could be seen on one level as the story of her journey from being the men's love object (desired, but never really "seen") to becoming a "loved one" in the death care industry sense of the word.

At the same time I was reading the book, I rented Tony Richardson's marvelous all-star film (1965). Both are equally wicked and satirical, but Richardson's film, in its exploitation of American anxieties about nuclear war, has more in common with Stanley Kubric's "Dr. Strangelove" than with Waugh's 1948 novel. In any case, seeing the movie didn't spoil the ending of the book. Both are brilliant and LOL fun.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

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A Masterpiece! Do Admit!
Delicious with a dash of malice

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh
Nancy Mitford , Evelyn Waugh , and Charlotte Mosley
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0395740150

Amazon.com

Charlotte Mosley's careful collection of Nancy Mitford's and Evelyn Waugh's delightfully careless letters immerses one in a lost whirl. The two writers met in London in the late 1920s, but their correspondence didn't take off until mid-World War II, when it quickly became an exaggeration-fest. Mitford, for example, matches Waugh's surreal reports from Europe with one about an M.P. swelling up before his fellow politicians' eyes: "Well, it took 2 ambulances to get him away & now he lies on 4 beds with his trunk hanging out the window. Let nobody say that war time London lacks fantasy."

For the next 21 years, these gifted gossips would render the ridiculous sublime and vice versa, turning (and then only mildly) serious in discussions of reading and writing, preferring to glide over the problematic and emotional. Throughout, Mitford likes to play the euphoric, lazy pupil, Waugh the master grammarian, theologian, and meanie. The exchanges on their own works in progress--particularly on Brideshead Revisited and The Pursuit of Love--are an important addition to literary history, but the book's true exhilaration lies in Mitford and Waugh's knowing--and knowingly vile--comic timing. Irresistibly offensive.

Customer Reviews:

A Masterpiece! Do Admit!.......1998-12-03

Once again Ms. Mosley has submitted for public consumption a fascinating collection. The letters that flew back and forth between these two literary giants are sparkling, witty, nasty and fabulous. They shed light on a glorious world of nobility and debauchery. Their correspondence fixes in my mind the fact that Nancy Mitford is the greatest mind of this century. Genius! Sheer genius!

Brava, Ms. Mosley, brava!

Delicious with a dash of malice.......1997-07-28

Poor Evelyn (talented, grumpy, constantly worrying about money) writes to lovely Nancy (talented, cheerful, constantly worrying about her Colonel) about real or imagined slights. Nancy charmingly takes him down a few notches when he deserves it (sometimes he's a bit of a bully). It is a joy to read the letters, even the squabbles (but especially the gossip - I'll never think of Graham Greene in quite the same way again). The comfort of old friends. How I shrieked!! (as Nancy would say)

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