Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics)

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This is most unfair; rather, it is a novel that reflects the slow settling of sobriety on a largely superficial society awakened to the realities of war. Preoccupied with the ‘Phoney War’, from declaration to the fall of France, or what Waugh described as the ‘Great Bore War’, Put Out More Flags was his sixth novel, and although it was a great success on first publication in 1942, it seems to be one of his few novels that people don’t know today.

In "Basil Seal Rides Again" he and Angela's now adult daughter Barbara (yes, named after his beloved sister) has fallen in love. The currents of history have a way of intruding roughly into settled habits, and Put Out More Flags offers an often hilarious reminder that one must laugh even amid dark days, even when a society finds itself forcibly shaken into sobriety. As in all of Waugh’s novels, we see beyond the brutal satire and occasionally glimpse that beautiful world that was old England. As the Zimbabwean appeared to have an allergy to thought and silence, I took refuge in the library, reading, for the first time, Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. In his dedication to Randolph Churchill, Waugh concedes that the book deals with ‘a race of ghosts’, characters who ‘are no longer contemporary in sympathy’ but survive ‘delightfully in holes and corners and, like everyone else,’ are ‘disturbed in their habits by the rough intrusion of current history’.This is listed on IMDB under Theatre 625 which was an ongoing series of BBC dramatic productions in which it was included. Lacking any substantial suspects, he tricks a long time literary friend named Ambrose into editing a manifesto that may be incorrectly interpreted as Nazi propaganda.

The books that comprise the Sword of Honour trilogy were written in the 1950s and 1960s when Evelyn Waugh was able to put World War Two into some kind of perspective. bodiless heads, green horses, and violet grass, seaweed, shells, and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. We see the language change from society shorthand to military doublespeak, the outfits from tea gowns to fatigues, and the attitudes from conversation to action. Back in London his friend Alastair Trumpington, refusing to try for a commission, joins the army as a private. He bluffs his way into the War Office and is taken on as an intelligence agent by an old acquaintance.

He is terrified of what might happen to him if the Germans invade Britain – since he is aware that the Nazis have persecuted left sympathisers. All alone, her estranged husband Cedric having joined the army, Angela Lyne stays in her flat and takes to the bottle. Confronted with the mental and physical decline of his recently widowed former mistress, Angela, Basil proposes marriage. Gribble thought the adaptation put more emphasis on the humor at the expense of the book’s underlying seriousness. It was reviewed by The Times (Stanley Reynolds) and the Daily Telegraph (Sean Day-Lewis) in their 17 December editions, as well as by Thomas Gribble in the EWN as noted above.

Waugh would perhaps be satisfied to know that his race of ghosts still survives in holes and corners, not least in country house hotels in the west of Ireland, where, like Ambrose Silk, lady novelists, ungentlemanly film-makers and ex-Zimbabweans seek a harbour from the currents of contemporary history. Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them.In terms of war heroism, Basil only thinks of achieving this without actually doing anything remotely dangerous or life-threatening—soldierly trench warfare, for example.