Gratuitous Mr. Woo Posting

I notice that rereading Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which relates the adventures of decent, naive William Boot amongst his fellow foreign correspondents in the embattled Republic of Ishmaelia, is all the more bitterly funny in light of the MSM's treatment of the wars in Iraq and Lebenon.

Yes, it looks like it's about time for me to take another run through the Waugh cycle. I seem to do this on average about every eight months or so.

I've always been quite interested in the similarities among many of Waugh's heroes (or anti-heroes, if you prefer), starting with Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall and working up through the aforementioned William Boot, Guy Crouchback in the Sword of Honor trilogy and, of course, poor old Tony Last in A Handful of Dust. As a body, they are decent, well-bred and rather passive, relics of an outdated age who get caught up in the whirlwind absurdities of modern life, violently pitched about and (usually, although certainly not always) placed back on their feet at the end, albiet not "happily" in the traditional sense. It would be both amusing and instructive to trace these common traits, explore the characters' differences and attempt to tie the whole thing back to Waugh's outlook.

I would imagine that there is at least a B.A. thesis in there somewhere, if not a Master's. Not that I would have been allowed to write one on it at the People's Glorious Soviet of Middletown. Aside from the insane requirements that had to be met just to write any English thesis there (given how many of us majors there were), I somehow don't think Waugh would have received much sympathy from most of my faculty, unless I was setting out to prove that he was a lesbian. Indeed, the only 20th Century author I can recall having read at all there is Toni Morrison, if that gives you any idea of the climate.

Which reminds me. If anybody does have some recommendations for scholarly studies on Waugh's writing, I'd be glad to hear about them.