Black Mischief in New Right Journal

Waugh’s somewhat neglected novel Black Mischief is reviewed in an artlcle posted in the Books Against Time column of the North American New Right journal, published by Counter-Currents Publishing. The review is No. 4 in a series entitled “Masterpieces of Aryan Literature”.  The general tenets of the “New Right” seem to be that history is cyclical and we are presently living in a down cycle; in these circumstances, the past is better than the present. The review is written by a blogger posting as Quintilian and provides an accurate plot summary of the novel together with this brief and pointed analysis:

…Waugh was brutally honest about the inferiority of the Negro race and its incompatibility with Western civilization. In the world according to Waugh, wogs began in Calais, and the United States wasn’t far behind. Anglo-Saxon superiority was a given and prejudice (in the sense described by Robert Nisbet) kept the savages and the lower classes at bay. All this was done, though, with great wit and manners. Nowhere is Waugh’s satirical genius seen in better form than in his 1932 novel Black Mischief…I can report that the ending is unexpected, and if you’ve ever read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus you might get a hint of what to expect…

Robert Nisbet was a conservative American sociologist who was educated and taught at the University of California, Berkeley and retired as Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia.

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