Black Mischief (1932)
Evelyn Waugh (Penguin, 1974)

238 pp. First reading.
Posted 13 November 2006.

The kingdom of Azania, an island off the coast of Ethiopia, is the unlikely setting for Waugh's inspired satire this time out. It's a backward place, mostly neglected by the world's great powers, covered by jungle and flies, its people a motley mixture of xenophobic cannibal tribes, failed Asian businessmen, and Mormon, Anglican, and Nestorian missionaries. It's the sort of place where the single rail line, constructed during a brief episode of colonial interest, is perpetually blocked by debris, where incompetent ambassadors man the embassies, and where executions are ordered for the mildest faults. To the extent that the kingdom can claim any distinction, it is this: its young Emperor is a recent graduate of Oxford University.

Emperor Seth, however, seems not to have gained much from his studies. He is entirely lacking in sound judgement and insensible of the demands of justice. His learning seems to have produced in him only this: an indiscriminate passion for the technical novelties and social experiments of modernity ("women's suffrage, vaccination, and vivisection"). When Basil Seal, an undergraduate acquaintance, arrives on the island, Seth places him in charge of a wide ranging program of reform. Azania is to be brought 'up to date'.

It doesn't work, of course. Azania's peoples are either too intransigent or too sensible -- it's not quite clear which -- to fall for it. Waugh was an implacable critic of the many derangements of the modern world, and the story provides ample opportunity for him to wield his valiantly acerbic wit. For instance: Seth decrees a Birth Control Pageant to, as he says, "educate the people in sterility". Illiterate women march under revolutionary banners: "Women of Tomorrow Demand an Empty Cradle", and "Through Sterility to Culture". (All the while they themselves believe that birth control promotes fertility.) This is but one example of the delicious satiric commentary on 'progressive' politics that runs through the book.

Which is not to say that he's on the side of the island's primitive peoples. I've not read any of Waugh's travel writing, but it apparently distinguishes itself by its robust cultural insensitivity. After reading Black Mischief, I'm not surprised. Someone who had read only this novel might well conclude that he is an irreformable racist, for he does not spare the gentle natives. Those of us who know him better know better: he is only an equal opportunity misanthropist.
   

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