—The Spectator has done a poll among writers to select their favorite school in fiction. William Boyd makes this his choice:
My favourite fictional school is the prep-school Llanabba Castle, featured in Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall. Situated in darkest Wales and presided over by the lugubrious Dr Fagan, Llanabba Castle also includes among its useless and decrepit staff the virile sexual predator Captain Grimes. Llanabba Castle is a potent, wonderfully cynical antidote to the jolly, rose-tinted and wholly unrealistic genre of most boarding-school novels.
A few spaces down Simon Heffer Makes the same choice:
Since almost every school in literature is either charmlessly absurd or like a prisoner-of-war camp, the choice is easy: Llanabba, the deranged prep school in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, where the author makes no attempt to do anything other than ridicule it. Of course, Llanabba – with its pederastic, unqualified and self-parodic masters, its bitter and resentful support staff and ghastly parents – is only so funny because one suspects it is much what the average prep school of 1928 was like. (Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys, covering a period a little more than a decade earlier, would seem to confirm this.) Today such an establishment would have been closed down without any help from the unlamented Bridget Phillipson, which makes it all the safer for us to laugh at it.
—The Telegraphhas a story in which Joe Sturgis considers “Whether AI will kill off the aspiring novelist”. Waugh comes into the discussion briefly:
…Fiction has always been a character-building trade. Literary biographies rarely describe a smooth ascent to the pantheon. No, the best contain much struggle and anguish. Among my favourites are JG Farrell’s stint in an iron lung in 1956, James Joyce’s eye surgery in Paris in 1921, and Flannery O’Connor’s lupus. There are exceptions – people like Evelyn Waugh, who seemed to produce masterpieces effortlessly – but usually it hurts to be a novelist, and you have to scrap to earn that status….
Here’s a link to the full article. This paragraph is followed by a photographic portrait of a young Evelyn Waugh apparently enjoying a pipe.
–The suburban paper Essential Surrey, Berkshire and SW London has printed an interview with novelist William Boyd who will soon make an appearance in its coverage area:
…For a writer who loves the instant gratification and audience feedback of live theatre, there has never been a better time to be a novelist. Far from finding bookshop readings and literary festivals a necessary promotional chore, Boyd gets a real buzz out of them.
“You see your readers face to face,” he says. “This is something very new in the writer’s life. Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene never met their readers.”
How the notoriously prickly Waugh would have handled that is another question. But Boyd is an altogether more gregarious character with a wide constituency of followers.
So, if you can, do snap up a ticket for his forthcoming appearance in Barnes. He’ll be genuinely pleased to see you.
William Boyd will be at St Mary’s Barnes on Sept 25 (8pm); barnesbookfest.org
Here’s a link to the full article. This paragraph is followed by a photographic portrait of a young Evelyn Waugh apparently enjoying a pipe.
–The suburban paper Essential Surrey, Berkshire and SW London has printed an interview with novelist William Boyd who will soon make an appearance in its coverage area:
A full copy of the interview is available here.