Waugh...a first visiting.

After having seen the recent movie remake of Brideshead Revisted, with the incomparable Emma Thompson and delightfully urbane Sir Michael Gambon (the second incarnation of Dumbledore) playing Lady and Lord Marchmain respectively, I decided to acquaint myself with the material's originator. I've now read a hearty handful of Waugh's novels and short stories, and I'm just to get to some of his letters (I'm hoping, as I seem to remember having heard, that they're simply loaded with scabrous and cruel little witticims).

My first read was, of course, Brideshead, which I picked up at what I have dubbed "The Warehouse." This rather impressive showing of shelf upon shelf of moldering books is something of an overflow facility of a local Washington used book seller. I read the book through on the out and back bus journey to New York (from D.C.) one weekend. I liked. Clearly, for I followed it up with a return to The Warehouse and further draughts of Waugh.

Put out More Flags was the latest I've downed. And I must say, I think it the best of the lot thus far, having read Brideshead, A Handful of Dust, Men at Arms, and Decline and Fall. The great joy for me in this 1942 novel is its frank, immediately after-the-fact viewing of the first, rather campy days of the Secod World War, full of the British establishment's and people's miscromprehension of the stark, inglorious and hellish experience to come.

Even with my only limited readings of Waugh, I feel confident in labeling Flags a work of an author at the very height of his powers. It has everything I've loved of the others. Its cast of characters includes charming Wildean aesthtes, clinging to the effete, oxonian idols of the past; cuckolded husbands running feverishly toward self-destruction; dipsomaniacal scions of faded, once noble families; and more.

And it's funny. It's very funny.