After a brief, apparently unpleasant, stay in Hollywood--he had been
commissioned to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited for the screen--Evelyn
Waugh wrote this wonderfully wicked satire of the movie business, the funeral
industry, lowbrow Americans and whatever other hapless targets wandered
within range of his savage pen. Dennis Barlow is a young British
poet, who, having lost his movie job, is temporarily employed at The Happier
Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery modeled after the hallowed Whispering Glades,
graveyard to the stars. But such a lowly job is anathema to the British
expatriate community, as Sir Ambrose Abercrombie informs him:
We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you
know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit--the
way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles--they
may think us cliquey and stand-offish. but,
by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two
is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and
it's only the finest type of Englishman that you
meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador,
Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell
you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here
shares it. We can't all be at the top of the
tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find
an Englishman among the under-dogs--except in England,
of course. That's understood out here,
thanks to the example we've set. There are
jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take.
However, when Barlow's roommate, Sir Francis Hinsley, is abruptly dismissed
from his studio job and hangs himself, Abercrombie and his fellow Cricket
Club members depend on Barlow to arrange the burial--after all, he knows
about how to dispose of animal remains, how much different can it be?
So Barlow heads over to Whispering Glades where he is treated to a hilariously
garish tour and sales pitch. He meets and falls in love with one
of the cosmeticians there, Aimée Thanatogenos, but must hide the
truth about his embarrassing job, particularly since she is also smitten
with Mr. Joyboy, the legendary embalmer at Whispering Glades. When
she proves unresponsive to his own poetry, Barlow woos her with passages
from the great poets, the works of whom she is utterly ignorant.
Naturally, it all goes bung, as Barlow's various frauds are revealed
and Aimée kills herself. Barlow extorts some money out of
the scandal fearing Joyboy and buries her at the Hunting Grounds, so:
Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the
Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard
would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée
is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.
Waugh lays bare a Hollywood where all is pretense and illusion, where
human lives--never mind human feelings--are meaningless, where semantic
niceties, like calling a corpse a "Loved One" are intended to mask reality.
It is brutal, and unfortunately still timely, and quite certainly one of
the best novels ever written about the movie industry. It is also
just a screaming hoot.
GENERAL:
-ESSAY:
England's
Doubt: When Christianity in England reformulated itself in the 18th
century as a scientific hypothesis, it became vulnerable to scientific
refutation. (Prospect)
-ESSAY:
The Necessity for Christianity (Professor Paul Johnson)
-ESSAY:
The Making of the English Middle Class: Under Margaret Thatcher and
now under Tony Blair, Britain has become markedly less class-bound. How
did this happen? (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Atlantic)
GENERAL:
-ESSAY:
England's
Doubt: When Christianity in England reformulated itself in the 18th
century as a scientific hypothesis, it became vulnerable to scientific
refutation. (Prospect)
-ESSAY:
The Necessity for Christianity (Professor Paul Johnson)
-ESSAY:
The Making of the English Middle Class: Under Margaret Thatcher and
now under Tony Blair, Britain has become markedly less class-bound. How
did this happen? (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Atlantic)
Comments:
Thanks for your concise and very enjoyable review of one of my personal favorite books which also had a great movie based on the book.
You are right on target about the book being very relevant today especially in its documenting of shallow folks who prey upon other folks at their vulnerable moments.
