» Waugh's Black Mischief

Mark Falcoff at AEI reviews ("Waugh's Postcolonial Studies") a hard-to-find Waugh novel, Black Mischief (1932). It is a fable set in the make-believe African island of Azania, concerned with the attempt of certain western idealists trying to modernize a backward country. As Falcoff says, it is a lot funnier seeing how closely recent history has followed Waugh's fable.

An excerpt from its beginning:

We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford. . . .

An excerpt from Falcoff's review:

Most Americans know of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)--if they know him at all--from the television series based on his Brideshead Revisited, a country house fantasy which held public television viewers in the United States in deep thrall for weeks on end two decades ago. Although Waugh intended Brideshead to be a deeply serious novel with a religious theme, its film version resembled nothing so much as an opulent advertisement for the British Tourist Authority. Indeed, if the Brideshead series were all one knew of Waugh, one would never suspect that he was one of the least provincial of English writers. In fact, much of his work deals with the point at which European civilization and colonial or semi-colonial societies met head on--usually to their mutual incomprehension.

ht: Scott at Powerline)