I went through a huge Waugh kick sometime in my late teens/early 20s and read everything, ending up quite sick of him/sickened by him. So I wasn’t really looking forward to this re-read for the Second Monday book group, dreading that this was one of the really dark ones. It was a lot funnier than I expected/remembered, but quite as offensive. The first third and the ending are most enjoyable. I wish we’d seen more of Mrs. Algernon Stitch, the ultimate multi-tasker, dictating crossword puzzle solutions to her maid while she interrogates her secretary (“‘Why should I go to Viola Chasm’s Distressed Area; did she come to my Model Madhouse?'”), supervises her kid, etc. I also love poor Mr. Salter, foreign editor of the Daily Beast and yes-man to the awful Lord Copper, who loved matching illustrations to funny legends for Clean Fun but was “thrown into the ruthless, cut-throat, rough-and-tumble of the Beast Woman’s Page” and then into his current post:
Mr. Salter’s side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right he said, “Definitely, Lord Copper”; when he was wrong, “Up to a point.”
“Let me see, what’s the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn’t it?”
“Up to a point, Lord Copper.”
“And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn’t it?”
“Definitely, Lord Copper.”
The Beast is housed in “The Megalopolitan building, Copper House, Numbers 700-853 Fleet Street.” At Copper’s behest, Salter hires William Boot (not the John Boot that Mrs. Stitch had asked for) to go to Ishamaelia. Salter dreads the necessity of broaching “country topics” (mangel-wurzels), but Boot has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s true that Boot’s column “Lush Places by William Boot, Countryman” covers “maternal rodents and their furry brood.” The family home, Boot Magna, is full of classic English eccentrics who care more about how to get the right horse to the hunt than making guests comfortable. The one that’s stuck in Boot’s mind about foreign travel is that he’ll need a lot of cleft sticks: “‘We can have some cloven for you,” [Miss Barton] said brightly. ‘If you will make your selection I will send them down to our cleaver.'”
The fake news is scarily relevant; we’re told “how Wenlock Jakes, highest paid journalist of the United States, scooped the world with an eye-witness story of the sinking of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit; how Hitchcock, the English Jakes, straddling over his desk in London, had chronicled day by day the horrors of the Messina earthquake.” “‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.”
Great images: “fibrous spindles of chicken with grey-green dented peas”; “an entire Christmas dinner designed for four children or six adults”
The only (to me) touching and beautiful passage in the book comes when Boot falls in love with the unreliable Kätchen, at sea:
For twenty-three years he had remained celibate and heart-whole; landbound. Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place.