But it is an invigorating book in its own right, with faith and some hope and even a little charity.
The trouble with the first volumes of trilogies is that we never know how much firepower is being held in reserve. For the rest, we get the usual treatment of material that in other hands could hardly escape being vulgar or snobbish: the attitudes, for instance, to good wine and bad breeding. The middle chapters are largely devoted to an elaborate joke which seemed to me very funny indeed, but which it may be possible to find tedious. “Then he was sorry for the great fish, and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him.” The scent is there all right, but the hungriest killer-critic, (unlike the sharks) will find nothing to get his teeth into.Įvelyn Waugh’s Men At Arms (Chapman and Hall, pp 314, 15s) is the first of a promised trilogy of novels about life in the last war, and a part of Mr Waugh’s aim seems to have been to celebrate once more the unequalled dottiness of the English going beyond laughter to tears, and beyond tears into a solemn wonderland inhabited by people like the glassy-eyed, unforgettable Apthorpe and the ferocious brigadier, Ritchie-Hook. We learn that the fisherman loves his victim even while he hunts it to its death: here all alert noses will be twitching for the first whiff of sentimentality. Test it at the danger points, and it triumphantly holds. The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish. It is a study in sustained crisis, a quite wonderful example of narrative art.
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