Novelist and journalist Allan Massie has died earlier this week. Among his obituaries, several mention a connection of his early fictional works with those of Evelyn Waugh. His son Alexander Massie writes:
…His novels … ranged widely. He began with comedies of manners – very much in the school of Evelyn Waugh – but his chief interests were political and historical. He believed writing was a form of carpentry: style could be important but function trumped form. He disliked mannered or overly-perfumed prose and his own style was clipped and epigrammatic. “I am a dandy who can no longer be bothered to dress” was the arresting – to my mind – first line of “The Death of Men”, his roman a clef about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.
The Times elaborates the point somewhat:
…The first of his 20 novels, Change and Decay in All Around I See, an Evelyn Waugh-style comedy, appeared in 1978, closely followed by The Last Peacock, a comedy of manners. But it was his third, The Death of Men, based on the kidnapping and murder of the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, that won him critical attention, with Encounter magazine describing him as “perhaps the finest living Scottish author”. The book won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Finally, the Daily Telegraph indirectly elaborates this connection:
…In 1976 he began to review fiction …. After several false starts he completed and published his first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See (1978), which he later described as “a somewhat scrappy comedy of low life in London”. He was pleased at the time with a party scene that lasted for several pages with all the dialogue left unattributed, but later came to regard such feats of ingenuity as rather pointless.
All three of the obituaries cited and linked above are worth reading. You will also find numerous references to Waugh and his work by searching “Allan Massie” in EWS News.
