Put Out More Flags

This book generates a love for the main character whose soul is pure but contaminated with classic British spoil - he is a product of aristocratic inequitable advantage. Basil Seal is the son of the Lady Seal, and lives through his mid-30's doing primarily nothing of great importance. In this journey without direction, he endeavors to be the subject of many people's ridicule. Armed with friends of great importance and power, Lady Seal attempts to steer her son back onto the road and in the proper direction. "Basil is a Philistine and a crook; on occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming Workers' State . . ." Throughout this book, his mother sends him off on jaunts to various British bureaucratic endeavors which Waugh parodies so capably well in appropriate British farce. You will fall off your chair laughing at the ridiculousness of such governmental inefficiency - something which may have been nascent in that time but no less frustrating than today's computer-created flustering. The book is split into four seasons of 1939-1940. The year of the inception of the "other" world war - or World War II. Everyone must make great sacrifices. This is not like the "other" war. "The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry to be worth a bomb." In the Autumn of 1939 just before the war commences, Basil is harmlessly bored. In the Winter of 1940, he plays a great hoax on his sister's neighbors with the Connolly children - a scam of great humor and brilliant dialogue. In the Spring, Basil discovers how to return to London and become peripherally involved in the great war - mainly due to his mother's consternation and demand. And, it all is tied up in an epilogue-like chapter entitled "Summer." The end - or Summer of 1940 - Waugh delivers us to discover the character of Basil is not as hopeless as we originally were led to believe. Basil matures as the war increases in intensity. He becomes a real citizen who will make a real difference in the world - but how great a difference we will not know. The 35-year old child becomes a man, and that even involves his relationship to his greatest love, Angela Lyne. This book deals with war without too much gore or battle reference. It concentrates rather about the bungling of the call to the citizenry for enlistment, creation of organization amid chaos, and the common call by the leadership. But amid the bureaucratic buffoonery lies the noble state of all for one and one for all. Each man has a call, one which requests an honorable response. And, like the vast majority of the citizens of England, the privileged and spoiled Basil responds nobly to the greatest call of his life and to those of his generation - which includes the author, another veteran of World War II.

This is Waugh's satirical look at England at the beginning of WW II, with two characters in particular receiving his sharp and witty arrows of reproach: Basil Seal, a military big-shot wannabe who ends up relocating London slum children when the army rejects him; and Ambrose Silk, an aesthete, who gets a job with the religious division of the Ministry of Information representing Atheists. Silk becomes a dupe in an anti-fascist scheme of Seal's that is hilarious while at the same time being pathetic. This was the time of the so-called "phony war," when things were yet relatively quiet in England and some people (the Basils) were only "playing" at war. Waugh lampoons this attitude and these people mercilessly in this novel. In this book, as usual, Waugh is "the first-rate comic genius" critics declared him to be.

This is one the great comic novels of the history of the world. I would expect it would not be quite the work to start out with, but for people aware of what Britain was like during the first days of WWII, this is pure pleasure. The book, like most of Waugh's satires, contains a number of secondary characters who are often quite amusing. In this Waugh is the equal of Dickens (a comparison Waugh might not have appreciated), in his celebration of the English eccentric. From a technical execution the novel is rather interesting in that its main character, its anti-hero, Basil Seal, is somewhat of a character himself. Basil Seal originally appeared in the work "Black Mischief" is a trickster, eternally on the lookout for a way of earning a dishonest living. Basil's life is complicated by the outbreak of war and the insistance by the women in his life to play a hero's part in it (preferably dying while do so, in the case of his mother). Possessed of considerable guile he hotfoots it off to the country where he runs a profitable extortion racket involving three very undesirable war refugee children. These obnoxious brats manage to destroy most of the stately cottages of, if not the upper classes, then the upper middle classes. Another central character in the book is Ambrose Silk. Silk wishes the war would go away and at the same time wonders what his role should be. Eventually he settles on publishing an arts magazine, whose most notable work celebrates his love for a German soldier is twisted into Nazi propaganda by Basil working as a counterespionage agent. Though filled with topical humor, "Put out More Flags" manages to transcend the time in which it was written. It contains a number of thinly disguised portraits of famous people. If anyone is curious as to the various identities, I would recommend Humphrey Carpenter's excellent work, "The Brideshead Generation." The work is also interesting for fans of Waugh as well. It is the second to last of his "funny" books. The next books would take on a more serious tone. Waugh's next book would be Brideshead Revisited. With the exception of "The Loved One" Waugh's later works would take on a seriousness which ultimately would set him apart from his contemporaries. I also recently read "The Sword of Honour" Trilogy and it is interesting to compare this work with "Put out More Flags." The themes are similar, but the approach is markedly different. This book shows Waugh as a writer who had already conquered many worlds, but at the same time was preparing to take on new challenges.

Not even the traumas of World War II could put Evelyn Waugh's delightfully satirical pen on hold; the horrors of war expose the grimness beneath his humor and invite a new kind of irreverence. Consider a scene in "Put Out More Flags" (1942) in which a woman's husband has just been killed in combat and the man with whom she's been having an affair wastes no time in proposing marriage. Her lackadaisical response to this most solemn of requests: "Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know."Like Wodehouse, but with greater subtlety, Waugh finds an underlying silliness in all types of characters and sets them up to be knocked down like ducks in a shooting gallery. In "Put Out More Flags," he dredges up some characters from previous novels and introduces them into comic situations within the context of the incipient European war (1939-1940). Foremost among them is Basil Seal, a thirty-six-year-old who is as unemployable as a six-year-old. His mother tries to help him get a prestigious position in the Army, but he blows it when he unintentionally and unknowingly insults the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bombardiers. Fortunately, he is able to get a job with the War Department where he discovers that the secret to success is to level charges of Communism and Nazism against his (mostly) innocent friends and inform on them.Basil's friends and family also make the most of war time. Ambrose Silk, a Jewish atheist, takes advantage of his job at the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information to start a fustian periodical. Alastair Trumpington, a pampered aristocrat, dutifully enlists as a soldier because he believes that "he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King's enemies to shoot at," while his wife Sonia waits for him in the car outside the training camp like a mother picking up her kid at school. Meanwhile, Basil's sister Barbara is allowing the use of their country estate as a shelter for poor people evacuating London for fear of German bombing raids; among them are a trio of insufferable brats named the Connollys who provide Basil with the fodder for an irresistible extortion scheme.Waugh's great insight was the immediate recognition of the potential humor of the war's impact on the British class conflict, and therein lies his brilliance. His books are funny, but more importantly, they're every bit as intelligent, perceptive, and well-written as any "serious" novel, whose level of social consciousness they rival. The twentieth century needed an Evelyn Waugh, and we certainly could use one now.

In this novel, Waugh brilliantly satirizes the English middle and upper class reactions to World War II. From the men who dress up in uniform and play soldier like little boys to the rogues who try to profit from war-time hysteria, Waugh finds plenty of targets. This book reads like a more socially-conscious P.G. Wodehouse. Quite funny, with a lot of truth hidden behind the laughs.