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Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)

by Evelyn Waugh (Author), Nigel Spivey (Introduction) "IN the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War - days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the..." (more)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (4 May 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141184019
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141184012
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 91,608 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #19 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Waugh, Evelyn

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Product Description

Product Description

What happened to the characters of DECLINE AND FALL and VILE BODIES when the war broke out? PUT OUT MORE FLAGS shows them adjusting to the changing social pattern of the times. Some of them play a valorous part; others, like the scapegrace Basil Sea, disclose their incorrigible habit of self-preservation in all circumstances. Basil's contribution to the war effort involves the use of his peculiar talents in such spheres of opportunity as the Ministry of Information and an obscure section of Military Security - adventures which incite Evelyn Waugh to another pungent satire upon the coteries of Mayfair.


About the Author

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was born in London and educated at Oxford. He quickly established a reputation with such social satirical novels as DECLINE AND FALL, VILE BODIES and SCOOP. Waugh became a Catholic in 1930, and his later books display a more serious attitude, as seen in the religious theme of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, a nostalgic evocation of student days at Oxford. His diaries were published in 1976, and his letters in 1980.
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First Sentence
IN the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War - days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace - and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal. Read the first page
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32 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Highest of Standards, 15 Nov 2000
By A Customer
Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) possesses the inestimable advantages of being the best writer in English of the twentieth century and not being attractive to the EngLit crowd. He was a conservative Catholic snob, after all, and though many people come to him because they are one or another of those things, or all three, I'm not one of them. I love him because he writes so well - so cleverly and, often, so cruelly.

But he is still famous and so I prefer one of his more obscure books, published in 1942 and rarely mentioned with the inevitable Brideshead Revisited (probably one of his weaker books) and Vile Bodies (certainly his weakest one, after Helena) when his work is summarized. The first few pages have probably convinced many people that it's justly obscure, but if you can get beyond them you find POMF one of his funniest books - and the quality of those opening pages will be plain on the re-reading of the book I'm sure you'll undertake if you finish it.

Quotation from POMF would be difficult and I don't intend to try: Waugh was not only a consummate prose stylist but also a Grand Maître of literary cabinetwork, and detaching individual sentences or paragraphs would be rather like wrenching a leg or handle off a Louis Quinze appliqué table and exhibiting it for isolated admiration. Suffice it to say that the book is Waugh in excelsis: snobbish, malicious, and extremely funny, and Basil Seal, the returning anti-hero of Black Mischief, is the primum mobile of the novel's two great comedic set pieces: the peculatory exploitation of a trio of gruesome evacuee children called the Connollys, and the enforced exile of Ambrose Silk...

Like almost all of Waugh's characters, Basil Seal is a character à clef too, but the sting of any possible offence caused by him to the models in real life was drawn by what Waugh said was one of the great literary truths. He once said that it is possible to ascribe the most rebarbative behaviour and morals to a character based on a friend or acquaintance and cause no offence so long as one also makes the character attractive to women. Basil is ...completely self-centred, almost completely selfish, and also something of a bore. He is, however, attractive to women. By all accounts this prophylaxis worked, and all facets of his character are on dazzling display in this best-kept secret of an unsurpassable uvre.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Funny but cruel, 4 Feb 2008
By Rusty (London, UK) - See all my reviews
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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars "Basil needs this war. He's not suited to peace.", , 19 April 2008
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
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
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