I appreciate dry British humor and I get it in the book, but I didn't really like this book which was a surprise to me. Perhaps it was the subject matter? I'm not sure. Maybe it would have been better to have listened to the audiobook. I do like the characterization as more "amusing" than laugh-out-loud funny.
However, the main reason I am posting is to say that if you didn't like this book and it's the only Waugh that you have read, then I encourage you to try something else. You might find it funnier. For example, earlier this year I read
Scoop which is a satire of journalism and foreign-war correspondents. I thought that book was much more entertaining than this one. So please don't give up on Waugh based on this book alone.
When I read older books, I like to seek out reviews or criticisms near that time period. Here are two that I thought that were particularly interesting.
Evelyn Waugh: The Best and The Worst, October 1954
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...54oct/rolo.htm
Quote:
He is, par excellence, an example of the artist who has created a world peculiarly his own. The adjective "Waughsian" is too much of a tongue twister to have passed into our vocabulary, but a substitute phrase has -- "It's pure Evelyn Waugh."
"Pure Evelyn Waugh." The expression evokes a riotously anarchic cosmos, in which only the outrageous can happen, and -- when it does happen is outrageously diverting; in which people reason and behave with awesome inconsequence and lunatic logic.
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New York Times Review, June 1948
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/...ugh-loved.html
Quote:
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“The Loved One” is not only satire at its most ferocious. It is a macabre frolic filled with laughter and ingenious devices. It is devilishly clever, impishly amusing. Although it is short, it could have been shorter to advantage. At times the joke wears thin, the continued attack seems a little too much like beating a demonstrably dead dog. Even Evelyn Waugh, accomplished writer that he is, doesn’t always know when to stop.
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