As an orthodox Catholic convert with a fondness for high quality British fiction, I had to have this book of Evelyn Waugh's gripes and barks at poor Cardinal Heenan concerning the end of the Latin Liturgy following Vatican II. As you would expect, Waugh comes off as witty, sardonic, and somewhat tenderly brokenhearted. It is rare to see Waugh in this mode, but you can tell he felt the changes in the Mass on a personal level. Modernity drove Waugh to drink & bouts of fantastic & biting satire, but in these letters he comes across like a very intelligent child who has lost it's mother. Heenan is the villain of the piece, though no fault of Waugh: the Cardinal's letters show him to be a smooth liar firmly bent on pursuing the Gospel of Trendiness with little regard for the feelings of his flock. All in all, a poignant chronicle of one man's dealings with a Bishop-as-Bureaucrat.

This book contains four very good essays -- one on the works of Evelyn Waugh, one on George Orwell, one on Aldous Huxley and a final one on the common threads running through the works of all three authors. The essay on Evelyn Waugh's works is particularly good. It points out alot of symbolism and motifs which I had missed (but which now seem obvious). This essay focuses primarily upon Waugh's use of architecture as a symbol of social values. However, it only covers Waugh's first four novels (Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and Handful of Dust). Similarly, the essay on Huxley only discusses his first two novels(Crome Yellow and Antic Hay) and Brave New World. Both authors continued to write brilliant satire throughout their lives (Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan comes to mind as an example). I wish the Greenblatt had expanded his study to include a representative cross-section of Waugh's and Huxley's works.

Sins are definitely out of fashion. The last time I came across the Seven Deadly Sins of Envy, Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust and Anger, it was in a glossy Singaporean magazine for the trendy crowd. Under each of the headings it featured big cars, expensive condos, the current "IN"-nightspots, the newest restaurants, fashionable jewelry, designer clothes and so on. The word "sin" may have made monks and Victorians tremble; but we just shiver in anticipation of the latest thrill. Alain de Botton captures this change in attitude perfectly in his 5-page afterword: "[Today] our concerns are of a different order. We worry about whether we are cheerful or depressed, fulfilled or low in self-esteem. We worry about happiness, not sin and virtue."

"The Seven Deadly Sins" have originally been published in 1962 by The Sunday Times, and authors from England have written all seven contributions. The book does not rank the sins in any order (rankings are a very American obsession, and it seems the English have not been infected yet in the early sixties). However, it is very fitting for our democratic society to begin with ENVY, Angus Wilson's contribution, and to end the book with ANGER, W. H. Auden's contribution. Envy is the quintessential democratic "sin." Alain de Botton reflects that "envy comes from comparison and [...] the habit for everyone to compare themselves to everyone else is a particularly modern, democratic one." People envy only those who they feel themselves to be like: "There are few successes more unendurable than those of our closest friends [and] it follows that the more people we take to be our equals, the more we will be at risk of dissatisfaction." Which explains why a society of equals does not automatically lead to more happiness for its individual members. Anger is also a very democratic "sin" because anger tends to arise from a sense of entitlement: "We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it" (Alain de Botton). A sense of entitlement comes with democracy: we are not just in pursuit of happiness, we assume we are entitled to it.

Wedged between the highlights of Wilson's and Auden's articles are contributions by Edith Sitwell on PRIDE (a tongue-in-cheek confession to the "virtue" of pride), Cyril Connolly on COVETOUSNESS (a very funny short story about obsessive greed), Patrick Leigh-Fermor on GLUTTONY (an indigestible, rambling piece of writing - skip this part of the menu!), Evelyn Waugh on SLOTH ("Sloth is the condition in which a man is fully aware of the proper means of his salvation and refuses to take them," the state of rejecting the "spiritual good" which - in modern parlance - leads to depression, the contemporary cousin of sloth), and finally Christopher Sykes on LUST (a fine example of British common sense).

If we worry about happiness, not sin and virtue, why should we read about "The Seven Deadly Sins" at all? Why worry about the "good" when we can go out and have "fun" instead? The answer is: the "good" is about the value we attribute to our lives looking forward and looking back, the "fun" is just living it. In general, we are bad at "just living" or "living in the moment." but experts in reflecting on the past and planning for the future. It is a smart decision to build on our expertise and put some meaning into our lives to make looking back and forward more enjoyable. After all, the good life and the happy life are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Alain de Botton points it out just so well: "If we listen to pre-Christian philosophers, there is never a conflict between happiness and goodness. For Socrates, the sinful man is at the same time the miserable man, the good one the happy one. It's only with the arrival of Christianity that a conflict starts to appear and that, unwittingly, it starts to seem as though being good is dull and not likely to lead one to happiness, while sinfulness is bad, but actually rather fun."

I first read this book after having exited the anguish of a doubting Christianity into the calm of a composed agnosticism 40 years ago.

I return to this book again and again and probably re-read it every 3-4 years. Never missing an opportunity to recommend it.

It reads like a thriller. The story unfolds inexorably to its inevitable climax, from the scholarly peace of Oxford where Campion was a foremost scholar of genius in the early part of Queen Elizabeth's reign, to its ultimately savage and bloody end on the gallows at Tyburn.

The story could be seen by some as one of undoubting faith. By others, perhaps, as a story of a scholar obligated by an absolute intellectual integrity and then driven helplessly, to his destiny, by an academically remorseless logic after his conclusion of the fallibilities of the reformation.

Whichever view one takes Campion was a hero in voice and in deed. His life was a poem. His writings those of genius - his ringing words still echo.

Evelyn Waugh, a convert himself, tells a story as good as any fiction but far more compelling and sobering because of the true biography that it is.

If there is a fault to this book, it is that it is too short. Waugh writes this work of history as one would a novel. However, there is plenty of historical detail. Nonetheless, in an effort to make the book more readable, Waugh has left out the footnotes and endnotes.

That being said, it is probably the best book we presently have on St. Edmund Campion. Edmund Campion was well known amongst Elizabethan circles, including Queen Elizabeth herself. He was lauded for his intelligence and wit and no one could match him in debate.

Edmund gave up what looked like a promising career in academics to become a Catholic. He studied at the College at Douai and became a Jesuit. However, at this time, it was like trading one acadamic pursuit for another.

Edmund was doing quite well at a professorship in Prague when he was called to go to England to minister to the Catholics who had not forgotten their faith. He was not sent as a spy but as a minister to the faithful.

This Edmund did. He did it so well, traveling about in disguise, that he eluded capture for some time. In the end, Edmund comes to a martyr's death (I leave it to Waugh to explain the details).

I judge a book, mainly, on whether I have attained anything good from its contents. Waugh's telling of the story of Edmund Campion has moved me. St. Edmund Campion died as did Christ, asking the forgiveness the very men who were to so cruelly slay him in front of a jeering public.

I'm very pleased I was able to find a copy of this book for my library. Most importantly, I'm very happy that I was able to learn something about this great saint. Your effort to do the same will be well worth it.

Waugh's details of Campion's European whereabouts gets a bit tedious but once Campion returns to England you can't put the book down. Waugh leaves you thinking which queen rightfully deserves the adjective Bloody.

Very insular and without context. I wonder if this is how post-modern lit will seem in 50 years.

This is the first in the 'Sword of Honor' trilogy of novels by Waugh, describing one man's experience in the British military establishment. At the onset of WWII, divorced thirty-something Guy Crouchback anxiously longs to serve his country in its time of need, but can't find a branch of service that wants him. By the end of this book, his training completed, he begins to wonder if his country (represented by its armed forces) really knows what's good for it. This book is a fairly realistic and often rather lighthearted look at the training received by an officer of the Halberdiers during the early days of WWII, before the true terrors and horrors of that conflict had become apparent. This volume contains some fine portraits and vignettes from British army life, after which an officer's death and the questions of responsibility it raises cause Crouchback to doubt the wisdom of his beloved leaders.

Some of the more humorous moments include the incidents involving Apthorpe's port-a-john (not as disgusting as you might fear), Crouchback's attempted reconciliation with his wife, and the ego-driven absurdities that lead to the Brigadier's reconnaissance mission, but the humor is of the dry British
sort, with few of the belly laughs that make books like Catch 22 so unforgettable. Rather more to the point is the mildly biting satire exposing how ill prepared for war Britain really was at the time, particularly in light of the high price Europe paid for that negligence.

While this reviewer certainly enjoyed the book, its target audience is probably not as broad today as it would have been forty years ago. Veterans of the armed forces who are interested in a nostalgic look back at this era will probably get the most out of it, followed by admirers of the gentle art
of British humor, while on the other hand, women looking for romantic adventure will find very little femininity in the book, and Gen-Xers hoping to read another 'Catch 22' or 'MASH', will likely find the story dry and insipid. So don't go into this book looking for a comedy - it stands better as a fictionalized portrayal of a particular time and place in history.

When Waugh wrote this trilogy, between 1951 and 1964, people loved the acerbity of his writing. But
they found Crouchback and his views perverse. In those days, the thought that the Second World War might
have been an error which left the world worse than it found it was almost unthinkable.

There had been frightful blunders such as Singapore, admitted the reader in the National Health spectacles.
But to see it all as a mistake, you would have to be...well, either a fascist or a believer in something perfectly
weird. For instance, a devout member of the old English Roman Catholic aristocracy. Down the narrow
perspective of that particular telescope, through which the welfare of the Vatican mattered more than cutting
Axis communications in the Balkans, things might well look different.

They did to fictional Guy Crouchback.

-The Crouchback tendency (Neal Ascherson, January 7, 2001, The Observer)

Like many of Evelyn Waugh's books, this one--the first in the Sword of Honour trilogy--is at least semi-autobiographical. But, whereas other
life experiences gave him the fodder to savagely satirize such things as adultery/divorce, journalism, Africa, and Hollywood, his treatment of his
checkered military career, probably tempered by a natural patriotism, comes in more for gentle ribbing. So there are plenty of amusing characters
and absurd situations, beginning with the nature of the enlistee, Guy Crouchback, himself:

'We don't want cannon-fodder this time'--from the Services--'we learned our lesson in 1914 when we threw away the pick of the
nation. That's what we've suffered from ever since.

'But I'm not the pick of the nation,' said Guy. 'I'm natural fodder. I've no dependants. I've no special skill in anything. What's more I'm
getting old. I'm ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.'

'I'm afraid that's not the official view. I'll put you on our list and see you're notified as soon as anything turns up.'

But Mr. Waugh's heart, understandably, doesn't seem to be invested in really letting loose on the British armed services. This combines with the
subject of the story--the painfully slow build-up to war--to render a novel that's somewhat less spirited than many of his others.

However, it does have one feature that more than redeems it and makes it not only one of his most invaluable works, but one of the most important
novels of WWII: its ferocious criticism of the British decision to accept the Soviet Union as an ally, rather than treat her as an enemy just as
dangerous as Nazi Germany. Guy's initial fervor for war comes as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:

Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that
shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart. [...] He lived too close to Fascism
in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth; as a rough improvisation
merely. He disliked the men who were edging themselves into power around him, but English denunciations sounded fatuous and
dishonest and for the past three years he had given up his English newspapers. The German Nazis he knew to be mad and bad. Their
participation dishonoured the cause of Spain, but the troubles of Bohemia, the year before, left him quite indifferent. When Prague fell,
he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the
wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and
hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

But he despairs when, Hitler having betrayed Stalin, the Soviets are thereupon blithely accepted as comrades:

Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.

'My dear fellow, we've quite enough on our hands as it is. We can't go to war with the whole world.'

'Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are
concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.'

'Justice?' said the old soldiers. 'Justice?'

'Besides,' said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one's mind but his, 'the country would never stand
for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are still pacifists at heart. So far as they have
any feeling of patriotism it's for Russia. You'd have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.'

'Then what are we fighting for?'

'Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler. God knows why. It was quite a job keeping neutral
over Spain. [...] It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there'd be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize
the war, not extend it.'

And so the comic misadventures that Guy undergoes in preparing for war are no longer even in furtherance of an ideal one can be proud of, but are
instead the minmum required of a patriot. Rare indeed is the book--fiction or non--that's this brutally honest about the ultimate futility of WWII
and that frankness makes it special...Grade: (A-)

Evelyn Waugh's THE LOVED ONE is a strange and amusing little book, and as he says himself in a prefatory note entitled "A Warning," it is, "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." Dennis Barlow is a one-hit-wonder poet and failed screenwriter forced to take a job selling and effecting pet cremations and funerals at an establishment called the Happier Hunting Ground. Doing so cuts him off form the snobbish Cricket Clubbers of expatriate English society in L.A.--they would much rather pay to send him back to the motherland than have him disgrace them by association.

Waugh also takes several good cuts at the vacuity of American life as exemplified by the heartless film industry and the garish tackiness of the Whispering Glades cemetery (complete with piped in sounds of nature)--a place of rest found enduringly beautiful by Barlow's love interest Aimee Thanatogenos. This mortuary cosmetician's name translates roughly as 'The Loved One, who gives Life to Death. No need for subtlety here as far as Waugh is concerned--this is Tinseltown, after all. More fun names: the virtuoso mortician also in love with Aimee is "Joyboy" and the advice columnist at the local paper who replies to her several entreaties is "Mr. Slump."

The characters don't offer much to redeem themselves, but that's the point, and Waugh doesn't waste any pages getting it across. Whether you have gone through the process of making funeral arrangements or not, THE LOVED ONE will prepare you for the sales pitch of "Before Need Arrangements" and various other details you weren't crazy about knowing but that are dealt with in such a funny, hyperbolized way here by Waugh. "A Warning" recommends that "squeamish [readers] should return their copies to the library or bookstore unread." What a silly thing to do that would be.

From cover to cover, the book is hilarious. Evelyn Waugh's dry wit will really inspire laughter. Waugh's take on L.A. funeral industry is amazingly funny and creative. His use of location, irony, sarcasm, and a line-up of well developed characters, is evidence of his good writing abilities.

Set in Los Angeles, Waugh uses the funniest names for two distinct funeral businesses. First, for the humanly customer is "Whispering Glades". Secondly, he develops a pet cemetary called "Happier Hunting Grounds". In a morbid way, these two names will make you laugh. Waugh ironically and sarcastically uses a serious service, the funeral industry, to make a series of funny events that you wouldn't think happens. In one part, Mr. Joyboy, the funeral director of Whispering Glades, fixes a smile on a corpse in order to show his female cosmotician that he likes her.

If you like dry humor, sarcastic wit, and great characters, The Loved One is a must read. In fact, I give it four stars and recommend it as a best seller. Waugh hilarious style of writing will leave you wanting to read more of his works.

After a brief, apparently unpleasant, stay in Hollywood--he had been commissioned to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited for the screen--Evelyn Waugh wrote this wonderfully wicked satire of the movie business, the funeral industry, lowbrow Americans and whatever other hapless targets wandered within range of his savage pen. Dennis Barlow is a young British poet, who, having lost his movie job, is temporarily employed at The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery modeled after the hallowed Whispering Glades, graveyard to the stars. But such a lowly job is anathema to the British expatriate community, as Sir Ambrose Abercrombie informs him:

We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit--the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles--they may think us cliquey and stand-offish. but, by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and it's only the finest type of Englishman that you meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. We can't all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs--except in England, of course. That's understood out here, thanks to the example we've set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take.

However, when Barlow's roommate, Sir Francis Hinsley, is abruptly dismissed from his studio job and hangs himself, Abercrombie and his fellow Cricket Club members depend on Barlow to arrange the burial--after all, he knows about how to dispose of animal remains, how much different can it be?

So Barlow heads over to Whispering Glades where he is treated to a hilariously garish tour and sales pitch. He meets and falls in love with one of the cosmeticians there, Aimée Thanatogenos, but must hide the truth about his embarrassing job, particularly since she is also smitten with Mr. Joyboy, the legendary embalmer at Whispering Glades. When she proves unresponsive to his own poetry, Barlow woos her with passages from the great poets, the works of whom she is utterly ignorant.

Naturally, it all goes bung, as Barlow's various frauds are revealed and Aimée kills herself. Barlow extorts some money out of the scandal fearing Joyboy and buries her at the Hunting Grounds, so:

Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.

Waugh lays bare a Hollywood where all is pretense and illusion, where human lives--never mind human feelings--are meaningless, where semantic niceties, like calling a corpse a "Loved One" are intended to mask reality. It is brutal, and unfortunately still timely, and quite certainly one of the best novels ever written about the movie industry. It is also just a screaming hoot.

GRADE: A

Mainly of interest to avid Waugh fans or scholars. These are juvenilia in which some seeds of the later Evelyn Waugh can be seen. Some of the short stories are amusing in the way of Saki or Roald Dahl, with ironic twists in the tail,sharp satire, and dark humor. The longer title story could be read as autobiographical. You'd need to be familiar with the terminology of English boarding schools to understand some of it. It seems unfinished.

The first story, "Loveday's Little Outing," is possibly the best story Waugh has ever written. The rest is interesting at best, but none of it reaches the level of biting wit that he usually exhibits. Unlike PG Wodehouse's short stories, which are only about half as good as his full-length novels, Waugh's short stories are actually quite enjoyable and sharp. Somehow acquire "Loveday's Little Outing" and leave the rest be.

The title story in this collection will be of interest to those who found Brideshead Revisited a good book. It won't make you any clearer on the difficult Mr. Ryder, who is as muddled and vindicative a teenager as any of us, but it is a good sort of Prologue to Brideshead. Of course it's available in the Complete Stories of E.W. as well.

Briefly, readers keen on African travel anecdotes, and on Waugh's particularly keen social observation, will enjoy this book. It starts off stiffly, with Waugh in England, but you would do well to get beyond his haughtiness - throughout the book he continues to surprise pleasantly - at times, on senses, despite himself. This is essentially a travel piece, written in somewhat conversational style, in which Waugh both describes a voyage from the UK, through the Suez Canal, and along the East African coast to South Africa and his perspectives on the voyage and his fellow passangers. He is entertained along the way, particularly in Kenya and Zanzibar, and otherwise entertains himself - and us, his readers along for the ride. There are interesting references to the 'Happy Valley' crowd of the Kenyan Highlands, among whom Waugh played. This book is up there with other great travel narratives and naturalist perspectives: DH Lawrences' "The Sea and Sardinia", Andre Gide's "Travels in the Congo", and Graham Greene's travel work ("Journey Without Maps", and his novel "Travels With My Aunt"). Whether the book has great literary merit is for others to decide - it is entertaining, human, and describes an area (Africa) and an epoch (post-colonial) through the eyes of one of the century's most visceral - if haughty - writers. Includes insight into what it is like to travel single and long in years. I recommend "A Tourist in Africa".

ericwiberg@worldnet.att.net

The best part of this book was the cover. A wonderful picture of a sunset in the mountains. Had the cover made it clear that the "author" did nothing more than take excerpts from other books I never would have bought the book. The excerpts were taken so that you never really knew who you were reading about. His choices left me feeling used and I am sure he ruined several good books for me. None of the stories related in "Wild" has convinced me to read the whole book. What a shame!

The literary quality of this book is fair. However, most of the stories have nothing to do with "survival" or "the world's most dangerous places." This is one of the most dishonest tiles I have ever seen. Come on. Where are the "stories of survival?" For example, you may or may not find it interesting to read Edward Abby's ruminations on floating through Glen Canyon, but there is no implication whatsoever that this is one of the world's most dangerous places, or that there was any issue of survival at all. The same can be said of 2/3 of these accounts.

This is yet another in Clint Willis's ongoing series of adrenaline, adventure, survival, disaster, storm, etc. series in which he seeks to capitalize on the rage for danger and excitement that is currently sweeping the literary market. In my search for material for a class on adventure writing I teach, I have read all of them, and found them a mixed lot with some real gems thrown in. This particular anthology is no exception, though I wish Willis would stop over dramatizing his titles. A more realistic name for the collection might be, "Exciting Moments in the Wilds," or "Wildernesss Moments."

Questionable names aside (giving titles to books is an art after all) this collection has some stand out and downright bizarre pieces that are worth reading. If you're looking for a good old-fashioned adventure story with plenty of excitement, try Dave Robert's "A Wilderness Narrrative," or Joe Kane's "Savages." For more than you ever wanted to know about tropical diseases and the dangers of traveling in the Amazaon jungle, try Redmond O'Hanlon's "In Trouble Again." But if you're looking for something really different, something that will not only entertain but make you question your sense of reality, read Barry Lopez's "Pearyland," in which the main character (a student Lopez met in an airport) steps into another, parallel world, or "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood. The Willows in particular carries a disturbing undertone of unease and menace. The things that happen in this story shouldn't, and there is no real explanation for them.

Other, less off the wall, though no less entertaining pieces inlcude Edward Abbey's "Down the River" and Evelyn Waugh's "The Man Who Liked Dickens."

All in all, this is a worhty addition to Willis's growing pile of anthologies, thanks to the solid contributions from familiar and well-established names, but when will Willis dare to include the work of lesser known, though no less talented writers?

In his introduction to this book, Waugh confesses that the four travel books he wrote between 1929 and 1935 "were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met". "When the Going Was Good" comprises of excerpts from those books, and I wouldn't quibble with Waugh's analysis.

The accounts should be interesting, as they cover Waugh's travels in the Mediterranean, Africa, South America and include descriptions of Ethiopia at the time of Haile Selassie's coronation and, later on, of his downfall. But, I found Waugh's writing very patchy, only rarely rising above the mundane. For example, he pays little attention to the topography of the places he visits - as a result I found it difficult to appreciate how the locations might have looked.

Waugh's observations, it might be argued, are "typical of the era" - his views of the "natives" he encountered seem outmoded to modern eyes. Nothing one can do about this of course, and it would be unrealistic to demand anything radically different given the time in which Waugh was living, but it can make for some discomfort when reading bits of his writing now.

Waugh's travels appeared to me to be mostly an aimless drift, fuelled by alcohol ("... we sat down to a breakfast of tinned partridge and Chianti"). In all, not an enthralling volume.

This book is a 'Must Read' for the following lot of people:
1) Those who have an appreciation for Waugh's fiction.
2) Those who have an interest in colonial Great Britain just before the fall of the British Empire when, arguably, it was at its height.
3) Those who have traveled well beyond the "It is Tuesday, this must be Bangkok" scheme of things.
4) Those who enjoy social satire mixed with dry wit, and enlivened by a wonderful sense of the absurd.
5) Connoisseurs of the English language in its written form.

'When the Going was Good' is five travel episodes written in a period from 1929 to 1935, as abridged by the author for inclusion in this book. These episodes range from a casual, meandering cruise of the Mediterranean Sea in 1929 to reportage on the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935 presaging the Second World War. In between are the coronation of Emperor Haille Salasie Ras Tafare(the first Rastafarian), some random "Globe-trotting" beginning in Aden running through the Zanzibar coast and then down to the Congo, and finally an attempted trip from British Guyana down through Brazil.
Obviously, the really beautiful thing about any book by Evelyn Waugh is the concise, incisive, succint and often surgically precise use of the Queen's English. What makes these gems particularly precious is that they are set in conditions that were considered laughably backward and dangerously primitive even for the standards of the early part of the 20th century. Any such journey into the Dark Continent, and into the New World promises to be fraught with dangers and difficulties almost beyond description. Fortunately for the world of literature these were met by an author who was up to the task of describing these incidents in a way that makes them interesting, funny, and illuminating. Waugh has an uncanny ablity to use the slings and arrows that life sends one's way as weapons of satire and delight. Perhaps the most delightful vignette in this book filled with delightful vignettes is his description of his adventures with the well-meaning but misinformed American theological professor who is the leading authority on the Ethiopian form of Christiantiy, and who meanwhile is totally confused by its religous rites. Their time together takes them from the midst of the royal coronation to a field trip trek through wilderness to that church's holiest shrine in the company of a multi-talented fly by the seat of the pants Armenian chauffeur and an Ethipioan urchin whom they pick up along the way. Suffice it to say that the material Waugh got in that one trip was of the sort that one could write an entire short book from, and indeed this is just what he did in the novella titled 'Black Mischief.' Yes, that's correct, Waugh fans, the stuff of some of his books was captured right here on these pages during these travels and herein lies a treasure trove of details that one finds later played out in the novella mentioned above, in 'A Handful of Dust' and even 'Brideshead Revisited.' Thus, reading these accounts of his travels really helps to bring alive those other stories which you have probably read and wondered about where he got his inspiration. Finally, for history buffs, one gets to literally live the life of the colonial gentleman in the midst of these pages because Waugh, afterall belonged to the smart set and the smart set made up a significant portion, however small, of the colonial population that ran the British Empire. So, when Evelyn goes travelling, he doesn't necessarily do it with a backback upon his back trudging to and fro. No, he has a set of trunks and helpers, and old school ties that lead to introductions which in turn lead to social sitauations that develop into adventures and eventually become fodder for his travelogues. The point being that because this was the author's life, we get to witness firsthand the life of Imperial Britain as it existed in the African colonies and British spheres of influence. This is heady stuff and really a wonderful kind of social history that anyone from the avid social voyeur-ethnographic tourist to the fan of the British colonial empire should appreciate.
'When the Going was Good" is a book that I can heartily recommend, and one that I took much pleasure from reading.