Put Out More Flags
by Evelyn Waugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Evelyn WaughEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-15
ISBN: 0316916056
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of Put Out More Flags
Book Review: Great Humor on WW II -- Note This Was Book Prior to More Morose Brideshead Revisited
Summary: 5 Stars
This book generates a love for the main character whose soul is pure but contaminated with classic British spoil - he is a product of aristocratic inequitable advantage.
Basil Seal is the son of the Lady Seal, and lives through his mid-30's doing primarily nothing of great importance. In this journey without direction, he endeavors to be the subject of many people's ridicule. Armed with friends of great importance and power, Lady Seal attempts to steer her son back onto the road and in the proper direction.
"Basil is a Philistine and a crook; on occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming Workers' State . . ."
Throughout this book, his mother sends him off on jaunts to various British bureaucratic endeavors which Waugh parodies so capably well in appropriate British farce. You will fall off your chair laughing at the ridiculousness of such governmental inefficiency - something which may have been nascent in that time but no less frustrating than today's computer-created flustering.
The book is split into four seasons of 1939-1940. The year of the inception of the "other" world war - or World War II. Everyone must make great sacrifices. This is not like the "other" war. "The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry to be worth a bomb."
In the Autumn of 1939 just before the war commences, Basil is harmlessly bored. In the Winter of 1940, he plays a great hoax on his sister's neighbors with the Connolly children - a scam of great humor and brilliant dialogue. In the Spring, Basil discovers how to return to London and become peripherally involved in the great war - mainly due to his mother's consternation and demand. And, it all is tied up in an epilogue-like chapter entitled "Summer."
The end - or Summer of 1940 - Waugh delivers us to discover the character of Basil is not as hopeless as we originally were led to believe. Basil matures as the war increases in intensity. He becomes a real citizen who will make a real difference in the world - but how great a difference we will not know. The 35-year old child becomes a man, and that even involves his relationship to his greatest love, Angela Lyne.
This book deals with war without too much gore or battle reference. It concentrates rather about the bungling of the call to the citizenry for enlistment, creation of organization amid chaos, and the common call by the leadership. But amid the bureaucratic buffoonery lies the noble state of all for one and one for all. Each man has a call, one which requests an honorable response. And, like the vast majority of the citizens of England, the privileged and spoiled Basil responds nobly to the greatest call of his life and to those of his generation - which includes the author, another veteran of World War II.
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