Ostentatious, mercenary and vulgar practices of Whispering Glades he has produced a gruesome mixture of farce and indignation. Waugh gets through with the sanctimonious, sentimental, hypocritical, childish, disgusting, But she appealed to some perverse element in Dennis.ĭennis courted her with excerpts from the great poets (she thought they were his) and plunged her deeper into the lore of Whispering Glades. She had majored in “Beautycraft” at college. When Dennis had to arrange the obsequies of his room-mate, an elderly English writer who “strangulated” himself, he fell under the fatal spell of Whispering Glades and he fell also for the allure of Aimée Thanatogenos,Ī beautiful girl with “a rich glint of lunacy” in her eyes, whose pride and pleasure it was to paint the faces of the dead.

At any rate, the Whispering Glades Memorial Park of this novel could hardly have been imagined by any English writer!ĭennis Barlow, a young English poet who had lost his movie job, found refuge as an attendant in The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery and crematorium which sped on a lesser scale many of the wondrous innovations of the greater institution.

Evidently he was inspired by the same outlandish establishment which has already been immortalized in Aldous Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”Īnd the pages of Life magazine. He has concentrated his heaviest fire upon the mortuary business. Waugh has left some fairly deep wounds in the much-scarred flanks of the movie business and has paid particularly discourteous respects to the British celluloid colony (pukka sahibs bravely maintaining imperial prestige among the barbarians), They aren’t that important or as representative (we hope!) as he thinks they are.Īlthough Mr. The excesses he mocks hardly deserve so obliterating an attack. But somehow he leaves the impression that he has fixed a sixteen-inch gun broadside at a target which could have been disabled as well withĪ harpoon. Waugh has never written more brilliantly. Ghoulish and its hyena laughter snarls obscenely. “The Loved One” is not a book which the squeamish or queasy of stomachs could face with composure. Rarely in fiction have such execrably bad taste and such cruel wit been combined in one short satirical novel. Not wasted, for he reacted with more than the customary violence to the horrors of civilization in Southern California, and he has written a thoroughly horrible and fiendishly entertaining book about it, “The Loved One.” Nothing much came from his labors but Mr.

His satirical-religious novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” for MGM, hardly a sinecure if he was to please both the movie moguls and his own artistic conscience. He was supposed to prepare a screen adaptation of Ot so very long ago Evelyn Waugh spent what must have been an unhappy sojourn in Hollywood.

The loved one by evelyn waugh