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Title: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0-316-92608-6 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.45 (141 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Mothers of great men often disconcert their son's admirers"
Comment: Dennis Barlow--a British poet--works (much to the shame of the British ex-patriate community) at the Happier Hunting Ground Pet Cemetery in Hollywood. When fellow Britisher, Sir Francis commits suicide, Dennis is roped in to organize the funeral. Sir Francis is scheduled for internment in the Poet's Corner with the services of the prestigious Whispering Glades funeral home. While finalizing the minute details of the funeral, Dennis meets Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetician at the funeral home. Aimee is also involved with embalmer Mr. Joyboy, and soon Dennis and Joyboy become archrivals for the lovely Aimee's affections.
Aimee and Joyboy take great pride in their work, and never once does their professionalism slip. Dennis, on the other hand, is remarkably irreverent about every aspect of life, so he has to resort to some devious means to win Aimee. Aimee is easily influenced (she may be beautiful, but she's not very bright), and just as she is swayed by Mr. Joyboy's status at the funeral home, she is also swayed by the idea that Dennis is a bona fide poet. Soon Dennis is borrowing lines from some of the world's greatest love poetry and claiming it is his own, and Aimee is caught between the two men--unable to decide which one to marry. Meanwhile Mr. Joyboy's embalmed corpses act as a sort of barometer for his courtship of Aimee--when the relationship is going well, "the corpses who came to Aimee for her ministrations now grinned with triumph."
"The Loved One" is full of sly, macabre humour, and some of the funniest scenes occur when Aimee goes home with Mr. Joyboy to meet his mother--a miserable woman whose bosom companion is a naked parrot named Sambo. "The Loved One" is one of the oddest novels in the English language, and it's certainly bizarre that a funeral home is the setting of a comic novel. Waugh--ever known for a biting, wicked sense of humour, exploits the language and internal politics of the funeral industry beautifully and mercilessly. I highly recommend this novel for an odd, distracting read--I doubt you'll ever forget it--displacedhuman.
Rating: 4
Summary: Waugh's Dark Send-Up of the Hollywood Funeral Industry
Comment: "This is a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." Thus, Evelyn Waugh begins "The Loved One," his macabre comic send-up of Hollywood, the Funeral Industry and Post World War II Southern California with a one-page preface entitled "A Warning."
"The Loved One" begins with the usual cast of Waugh characters. There is Sir Francis Hinsley, an aging Englishman who, when he first arrived in America more than twenty years earlier was the only knight in Hollywood, President of the Cricket Club and chief screenwriter at Megalopolitan Pictures. Now in decline, he no longer reads, writes or does much of anything except sit in a rocker, read a tawdry magazine or two, and drink whiskey and soda. He lives with the much younger English expatriate, Dennis Barlow, a poet whose one literary success earned him an invitation to Hollywood where his screenwriting career quickly dissipated. Barlow now works at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery, an embarrassment to his English colleagues in Hollywood. As the actor Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie tells young Barlow, in a sort of recasting of the White Man's Burden in a thoroughly modern context:
"We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit-the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles-they may think us cliquey and stand-offish, but, by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and it's only the finest type of Englishman that you meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. We can't be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs-except in England, of course. That's understood out here, thanks to the example we've set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take."
The stage thus set, "The Loved One" soon takes off into a dark comic narrative of the American funeral industry. Sir Francis, no longer wanted by Megalopolitan Pictures, is turned out of his office and shunned. Young Barlow returns home to find that Sir Francis, in despair, has hanged himself. Appropriate funeral arrangements must be made.
Barlow then embarks upon his adventure in the funeral industry, making arrangements at Whispering Glades, a full-service funeral establishment and cemetery for Hollywood's rich and famous:
"Times without number since he first came to Hollywood he had heard the name of that great necropolis on the lips of others; he had read it in the local newssheets when some more than usually illustrious body was given more than usually splendid honours or some new acquisition was made to its collected masterpieces of contemporary art. Of recent weeks his interest had been livelier and more technical because it was in humble emulation of its great neighbor that the Happier Hunting Ground was planned. The language he daily spoke in his new trade was a patois derived from that high pure source. . . . As a missionary priest making his first visit to the Vatican, as a paramount chief of Equatorial Africa mounting the Eiffel Tower, Dennis Barlow, poet and pets' mortician drove through the Golden Gates."
In a brilliant comic chapter, Barlow meets first the Mortuary Hostess, who explores burial options with him:
"Embalmment, of course, and after that incineration or not, according to taste. Our crematory is on scientific principles, the heat is so intense that all inessentials are volatilized. Some people did not like the thought that ashes of the casket and clothing were mixed with the Loved One's. Normal disposal is by inhumement, entombment, inurement or immurement, but lately many people just lately prefer insarcophagusment. . . . That, of course, is for those for whom price is not the primary consideration."
After choosing a burial option, there is the matter of selecting appropriate garb for the deceased, viewing the various slumber rooms for Sir Francis' wake, and selecting a burial site in Whispering Glades. As the Hostess explains: "The Park is zoned. Each zone has its own name and appropriate Work of Art. Zones of course vary in price and within the zones the prices vary according to the proximity to the Work of Art." And the Park is, of course, restricted to Caucasians: "The Dreamer has made that rule for the sake of the Waiting Ones. In their time of trial they prefer to be with their own people."
Barlow then moves on to the Funeral Director, who, in a brilliant passage of dark comic wit, explains the benefits of Before Need Arrangements to Barlow, trying to sell him on the need for making his own funeral arrangements while he's young.
Finally, young Barlow is introduced to the mortuary cosmetician, Aimee Thanatogenos, and the embalmer, Mr. Joyboy. It is here that the real plot begins, for the second half of "The Loved One" brilliantly narrates an offbeat love triangle among Barlow, Aimee and Joyboy that ends in a darkly comic way that only Waugh could imagine.
"The Loved One" is a short, brilliant, dark, and funny comic novel that represents Waugh at his best. Read and enjoy!
Rating: 5
Summary: This Book Really Bites (In the Good Way)
Comment: I didn't really know what to expect of this novel since is is thought of as one of Waugh's minor novels. After reading The Loved One, I can't see why this is considered one of the lesser works. The Loved One is one of the most hilarious and true novels I have ever read. Waugh is wise to some of the darker aspects of human nature, and he possesses the ability to open up the readers eyes to that reality.
The plot centers on a love triangle between Dennis, Aimee, and Mr. Joyboy. All of them work in the funeral industry in Hollywood which Waugh uses to lambaste the commercialism of our culture and the selfishness and heartlessness that produces it. At times, the novel is hilarious, such as when Mr. Joyboy tries to express his love for Aimee through the smiles on the corpses he prepares, but the novel is always dark. These people are trying to find true life and love, but they are in despair and are unable of achieving happiness.
The Loved One is an absolutely brilliant novel by of the the twentieth century's great novelists. Certainly, read his most popular works such as Brideshead Revisited (my favorite), A Handful of Dust, and Scoop, but don't let yourself miss this one.
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Title: Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926116 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926108 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926078 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926345 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926604 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 20 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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