Put Out More Flags (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

This is a novel that, once finished, you need to stand back from in order to appreciate. It would be easy to dismiss its cast of upper-class twits, scoundrels, do-gooders and self-absorbed idlers as anachronistic, unrepresentative relics of a vanished age. But at the same time, they seem to capture something of a unique, confusing and transitional `moment' when the world is poised, and `phoney' war has not yet given way to the real thing; when their cherished illusions and assumptions have not yet crumbled in the face of an emerging, more brutal order of things.

In Basil Seal, Waugh's recurring scoundrel, there's plenty to laugh at, particularly as he seeks to billet three appalling evacuee children on unsuspecting local families (to his own financial advantage, naturally); and manoeuvres adroitly and unscrupulously in the hilariously dysfunctional Ministry of Intelligence. Other characters are endearing in their new-found enthusiasm for all things military, and Waugh gets plenty of laughs from the frequently pointlessly busy nature of army life. But depression and death lurk here, too, and there's an ominous undertone to this 1942 work that presages more difficult times ahead. This unevenness of tone, especially because it's reinforced by the `lightness' of the characters and the pretty insubstantial plot, make this overall a less than completely satisfying work, its considerable satirical achievements notwithstanding.

Basil Seal, familiar to readers of Black Mischief (1932) as the man hired by the ruler of an African nation, an Oxford friend, to modernize it, has returned to England, his ludicrous efforts for naught. It is the autumn of 1939 (in this 1942 novel), just as war is breaking out, and Basil, one of the "bright, young things" on whom Waugh casts his satiric eye and biting wit, is bored. Penniless, he accepts his sister Barbara's suggestion to help her to place urban children with rural families to protect them from the incipient bombings. Soon he has turned this in to a typically profitable business--country house residents are more than willing to pay Basil NOT to bring three especially monstrous children, to live with them.

Strong on character, grim humor, and satire, and short on overall plot, Waugh has created in this novel characters who represent the worst of upperclass young people--their shallow interests, indifferent education, frivolous behavior, lack of long-term goals, and seeming absence of any values except pleasure. Basil has had a long affair with Angela Lyne, but dallies with other women. Angela's cuckolded husband Cedric enlists in the war effort, while she, lonely, turns to drink. Ambrose Silk, half-Jewish and openly gay, works to establish a literary magazine until he runs afoul of the censors (in the person of Basil). Two writers, Parsnip and Pimpernel, reputed to have been modeled on W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, run off to the States to avoid the war completely.

As the novel moves from autumn, 1939, to the summer of 1940, when the mobilization is fully underway, Waugh skewers the naivete of his subjects and their universal desire to use the war to get ahead. None of them take the war seriously, nor do they realize that the very fabric of their country is at stake. Basil and friends want to be among "the hard-faced men [of 1919] who did well out of the war." Image is more important than reality, which they seem determined to ignore.

The last of Waugh's satiric novels (since his later novels become far more serious), this one is full of ironic humor directed at the (usually) wealthy young people who allow life to happen to them, assuming that they will always be able to make lemonade from lemons. In the course of the novel, all will come to new understandings, and when France falls, the scene is set for reversals and revelations. Fun to read and historically important for the attitudes it records among this group, Put Out More Flags is classic Waugh satire. n Mary Whipple

I first met the character of Basil Seal in Waugh's 1932 novel "Black Mischief". I thought he was a hilarious, drunken, upper class rogue...and I followed him happily from London to a troubled African state, where he attempted to set up his own crazed government - but ended up unwittingly eating his own girlfriend in a cannibalistic stew.

But in "Put Out More Flags", I found Basil almost entirely unendearing. The way he uses child evacuees to put a few quid in his own pocket...the way he betrays his old friend Ambrose Silk so he can move into his lavish Bloomsbury flat...in fact, Basil's entire profiteering attitude in this wartime offering struck me as less and less funny as I went on.

Yes, Basil Seal is a satirical figure - and yes, people will always try to profit from some sort of tragedy...but all of the characteristics that previously made Basil so fun (gallavanting abroad, drinking for four days on the trot, becoming the royal adviser of an African king) seem to be seriously lacking here. I simply found him spiteful and mean-spirited, feeding off others and behaving like a true wastrel at a time of national crisis.

Waugh is an accomplished satirist and I admire much of his work, but he is so utterly damning of the British military - and makes the British look so generally flippant and stupid - that it's a wonder this book sold at all, seeing as it hit the shops in 1942...when war was still raging. I do wonder, with so much death on the battlefields abroad...and patriotism at an all-time high...how this sort of satire could have been palatable to the public at all.

It's funny now, with 50 years of hindsight...but at the time, this novel could easily have been judged grossly offensive. Give it a try if you're a Waugh aficionado. I think, however, there's a clear reason why this book is considered one of Waugh's less successful works. It's simply not as good as his social comedies from the 20s and 30s.