—The Guardian’s recent selection of the “Top 100 Novels” has left many readers disappointed. The Spectator has an article by Michael Henderson explaining why, at least in his case:
…There are always going to be notable omissions, because no list can represent 250 years of novel writing in a way that satisfies all tastes. But when a ‘Hot Hundred’ finds room for Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, as the Guardian’s does, and no place anywhere for Evelyn Waugh, one wonders about the judges’ sanity.
Waugh – it has been said so often, it is now the stuff of cliché – wrote the most beautiful prose in English in the 20th century. To exclude him from a list of this sort is like writing a history of jazz without reference to Duke Ellington.
Miss Dangarembga may be a good writer, though it’s unlikely her book, which sits at position 74, should be higher placed than Hardy’s The Return of the Native (at 95), DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow (77), and Mann’s Buddenbrooks (81). But what do Hardy, Lawrence and Mann matter when you’re trying – as the Guardian is – to rewire the imagination of your readers?…
The article continues with identifications of several other examples of the weakness of the article’s selections. The full article is available here.
–The religious/philosophical magazine First Things has an article by its editor R. R. Reno on Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour. It is entitled “Quantitive Judgements Don’t Apply” and opens with this:
For years I have aspired to read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. But bound together the three novels (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle) make for a weighty volume. Where to find the time? Friends in North Carolina overcame my lassitude. Their book group took up Sword of Honour. Would I join them? I could in spirit, if not in person. So, I bought a copy and, transfixed, I read the 800 pages very nearly in a single sitting.
The bulk of Sword of Honour concerns military life. Waugh enlisted in 1939 at the outset of the war, and he served until its end in 1945. Like other novels about World War II, Sword of Honour depicts immobile bureaucracies, eccentric commanders, and the way in which so much energy is expended on pointless enterprises. Midway through the narrative, Waugh describes the chaotic retreat of British forces on the island of Crete after they fail to repulse the German invasion. Across these justly praised pages, Waugh captures the combat’s confusion and its atmosphere of soul-wearying futility…
The remainder of the article contains an excellent review of the book and why it is worth reading. Here’s a link.
–The US-based Jesuit journal America has published a review of the recent British book Converts by Melanie McDonagh. Here are the opening paragraphs:
It is still a little hard to believe.
Over a period of 70 years, in the final decades of the British empire, a group of highly talented artists and writers decided to become, of all things, Roman Catholic. These were, in the words of Melanie McDonagh in her new book Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, people of “blazing individuality,” the sort of folks you would love to have a drink with but maybe wouldn’t expect to find in church. But that’s where they wound up, and boy is it fun to spend some time with them.
McDonagh gives us a rollicking account of these men and women as they make their way across the Tiber. Some of these individuals are well known (Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark), others less so (the writer Maurice Baring, the artist David Jones). McDonagh’s overarching question is simple: Why did they choose to do this? Fortunately for us, there is plenty of raw material in the form of letters and essays describing their spiritual journeys…
The review by Maurice Timothy Reidy continues with several interesting cites to the book’s observations and conclusions, some of which refer to those of Waugh. Here’s a link.
