Emil Miller
08-27-2012, 09:28 AM
When Evelyn Waugh was in Hollywood in 1947, discussing the possible filming of Brideshead Revisited, he must have been amused at the incongruity of a locality that had Arnold Schoenberg and Shirley Temple as neighbours but it was a tour of the famous Forest Lawn cemetery that inspired this most trenchant satire on the American commercialisation of the dead.
Whispering Glades is a vast necropolis laid out, with the American genius for bad taste, in the form of a theme park and is the background for a triangular romance between Aimée Thenatogenos, a beautician at the mortuary, and Dennis Barlow, a young impecunious English poet who, having failed to produce the desired studio script for a life of Shelley, has found work in the Happier Hunting Ground pets cemetery in Los Angeles; which allows for some wry observations on the obsequies of animals and humans.
The third party is Mr Joyboy, chief mortician at Whispering Glades.
On his first tour of Whispering Glades, Dennis is bemused by the phony paraphernalia of the place: the faux ancient chapels, piped birdsong and electrically manufactured humming of bees etc.
This passage is pure Waugh and illustrates the satirist's disdain for the insincere:
The graves were barely visible, marked out by little bronze plaques, many of them as green as the surrounding turf. Water played everywhere from a buried network of pipes, making a glittering rain-belt waist high out of which rose a host of bronze and carrara statuary, allegorical, infantile or erotic. Here a bearded magician sought the future in the obscure depths of what seemed to be a plaster football. There a toddler clutched to its stony bosom a marble Micky Mouse.
For all it's amusing and biting criticism, The Loved One eventually falls victim to the bad taste it lampoons. In writing black humour there has to be a balance and in this book, with its particularly gruesome ending, the blackness far outweighs the humour.
Whispering Glades is a vast necropolis laid out, with the American genius for bad taste, in the form of a theme park and is the background for a triangular romance between Aimée Thenatogenos, a beautician at the mortuary, and Dennis Barlow, a young impecunious English poet who, having failed to produce the desired studio script for a life of Shelley, has found work in the Happier Hunting Ground pets cemetery in Los Angeles; which allows for some wry observations on the obsequies of animals and humans.
The third party is Mr Joyboy, chief mortician at Whispering Glades.
On his first tour of Whispering Glades, Dennis is bemused by the phony paraphernalia of the place: the faux ancient chapels, piped birdsong and electrically manufactured humming of bees etc.
This passage is pure Waugh and illustrates the satirist's disdain for the insincere:
The graves were barely visible, marked out by little bronze plaques, many of them as green as the surrounding turf. Water played everywhere from a buried network of pipes, making a glittering rain-belt waist high out of which rose a host of bronze and carrara statuary, allegorical, infantile or erotic. Here a bearded magician sought the future in the obscure depths of what seemed to be a plaster football. There a toddler clutched to its stony bosom a marble Micky Mouse.
For all it's amusing and biting criticism, The Loved One eventually falls victim to the bad taste it lampoons. In writing black humour there has to be a balance and in this book, with its particularly gruesome ending, the blackness far outweighs the humour.