Back to Blog
Home of the brave book cover6/3/2023 ![]() With no qualifications and no local knowledge, Basil is appointed Minister for Modernisation by Seth, who sees Basil, accurately, as a representative of “Progress and the New Age”. The first edition of Black Mischief (1932).Īzania’s modernisation is captained by the foolish Oxford-educated Emperor Seth and Basil Seal, an Englishman on the make, who has stolen his mother’s jewellery to finance his travel. Set off the coast of northeast Africa, on the fictional island of Azania, Waugh’s novel satirises the country’s conversion from tradition to modernity. It did, however, ignite a scandal in English letters that reveals the values of 1930s Britain in some troubling ways.īlack Mischief is a dystopian satire like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published earlier that same year. ![]() The novel wasn’t a failure, although it did not sell in the way he wanted. Waugh thought Black Mischief would be even more successful, particularly across the Atlantic. The success of that novel and his later classic Brideshead Revisited (1945) meant Waugh would forever be associated with the hedonism of 1920s aesthetes and party-goers. He’d had a hit two years prior with Vile Bodies, a novel that made famous (even as it mocked) the slang and habits of the aristocratic Bright Young Things and propelled Waugh to literary stardom. Ninety years ago, in October 1932, the English satirist Evelyn Waugh published his third novel Black Mischief.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |