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The perfectly manipulated anarchy of Decline and Fall, at once playful and lethal, was peopled with a rout of sinister caricatures tagged with unforgettable names (Waugh is probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest), and the American evangelist, Mrs. Melrose Ape. With her cotton-winged angels (Chastity, Divine Discontent, et al.), Mrs. Ape wowed high society by singing her inspirational hymn: There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.
Bright Young Books. The bright books followed one another like delayed bursts of sinister laughter. "Spotty, a little flat, not quite so good," some readers said. But they were still the funniest books of their kind being written, and Evelyn Waugh was Britain's No. 1 satirical novelist.
Vile Bodies orchestrated the gay dance of death of Mayfair's Bright Young Things between the wars. Readers were somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the ending: the unheroic hero stands in the total blackness of the next war's no-man's-land, waiting to toss his Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking of Waugh's novels, reported the lunacies of Communist and fascist revolts in another African state whose savagery and ignorance were excelled only by the savagery and ignorance of the great British press organization marshaled to cover it.
Put Out More Flags, written in six weeks while Waugh was cooped up on a troopship during World War II, described Basil Seal's war effort, in the course of which he profitably blackmailed his sister's respectable neighbors by billeting on them three evacuee children so monstrous as to be almost lifelike.
Sealskin in the Bathtub. The world has never been notably sane, but it exists under the convention that it is—just as in certain families there is an agreement not to notice that a "peculiar" aunt wears three hats to the breakfast table and a sealskin coat in the bathtub. Waugh's world simply ignores that convention. Lunacy is its norm, evil is without guilt, pain without pathos, and tragedy is comedy. Yet, in lucid intervals, the real world and Waugh's world are seen in part to be one. The degree to which they are so measures Evelyn Waugh's ironic vision of mankind.