Love Among The Ruins: A Romance Of The Near Future – Evelyn Waugh, 1953 ★★½

The Future is on Fire

World War II ended in Allied victory, but in its aftermath Evelyn Waugh still heard the toll of doom. Love Among The Ruins presents a future without faith, hope, or love, only the State.

Even 1984 gave readers a rooting interest. Here you get an arsonist.

When we first meet Miles Plastic, he is already in prison. In the brave new world that is Waugh’s future Great Britain, prisoners are treated as first-class citizens. The worse the crime, the easier the time. Miles enjoys walks in the moonlight to punctuate idle, carefree days.

Plastic is presented less as a character than an avatar:

The State had made him.

No clean-living, God-fearing, Victorian gentleman, he; no complete man of the renaissance; no genteel knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even, noble savage. All that succession of past worthies had gone its way, content to play a prelude to Miles. He was the Modern Man.

Published as a novella while Waugh was between installments of his “Sword Of Honour” trilogy, Love Among The Ruins continues the author’s concern with what he saw as Great Britain’s irresistible cultural and political decline after the war, when socialism replaced the class system and England’s traditional acceptance of Christianity quickly fell away.

Evelyn Waugh three years before the publication of Love Among The Ruins. Image from https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/21/dystopian-fiction-is-big-now-but-heres-a-book-for-people-worried-about-fake-news/

This time, instead of retelling his wartime experiences through a fictional lens, Waugh fast-forwards into a not-so-distant future where people live under domes and follow preselected career paths. Miles Plastic, an orphan, is raised on modern art and dishwashing in preparation for a position of high rank in the Air Force.

But Plastic likes burning things down.

Obeying his thirst lands him in Mountjoy Castle, formerly a stately manor, now a prison. Life there is better than ever. As Waugh writes, “it was a first principle of the New Law that no man could be held responsible for the consequences of his own acts.”

Miles enjoys walking Mountjoy’s palatial grounds, communing with the moonlight while Debussy is played in the ballroom for the other inmates. [One later complains about “no feeling” in the violinists’ pizzicato.] After nearly two years, Miles is told “bluntly and brutally” that he has been rehabilitated. The Chief Guide at Mountjoy tells Miles:

“In the New Britain which we are building, there are no criminals. There are only the victims of inadequate social services.”

As a reading experience, Love Among The Ruins offers an amusing if especially bleak version of the dystopian novel most famously explored in the prior decades by two countrymen with whom Waugh had little else in common, Aldous Huxley [Brave New World] and George Orwell [1984].

The best thing about Love Among The Ruins may be its brevity: It makes its sarcastic points and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

What there is of a plot involves what happens to Miles after his rehabilitation. He is sent to work at an euthanasia facility where lines of “welfare-weary citizens” are always forming. Being this is a socialist paradise, lines are always long and service bad:

Satellite City was said to be the worst served Euthanasia Centre in the State. Dr. Beamish’s patients were kept waiting so long that often they died natural deaths before he found it convenient to poison them.

One day a woman appears at the Euthanasia Centre, a ballerina with whom Miles immediately falls in love. What attracts him isn’t her trim build or beautiful eyes, but rather her “long, silken corn-gold beard.”

Waugh did his own cut-and-paste illustrations for a first edition of Love Among The Ruins, using classic Greek imagery but adding elements in keeping with his story, such as a beautiful woman with a beard. For more examples of Waugh's image-making, visit http://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-58/index.html.

Readers familiar with Waugh going in may be struck by the way Love Among The Ruins recalls the satirist of an earlier day, before the author redefined himself in a more sentimental and overtly religious direction with Brideshead Revisited. Here you see religious elements only in the way Waugh points out their absence. Officials greet each other with “The State be with you.” On what is now called “Santa Claus Day,” an old man watches a Nativity Play and is struck only by how coarse maternity care was back then.

Waugh is in full fun-poking mode here, both in what he writes and the way he writes it. When Miles meets Clara, the woman with a beard, “turbulent sea birds seemed to be dashing themselves against the light in his own heart.”

After a night of outdoor love-making with Clara, Miles repines to ponder his newfound happiness:

“On such a night as this,” said Miles, supine, gazing into the face of the moon, “on such a night as this I burned an Air Force Station and half its occupants.”

Waugh can only go so long in this ultra-cynical direction before he must either develop the story into something more constructive or else wrap it up. Waugh does the latter; I can’t say he chose wrong.

Miles seems an unlikely candidate for rehabilitation of any kind, while the novella’s other characters are single-note entities. Even Clara is little more than a chick with a beard; when she sheds it late in the story, she loses her identity.

That was Waugh’s point: A Godless life where material trumps spiritual is no place for actual human beings. How you take this message may dictate whether you enjoy the novella or dismiss it as the work of an aging crank.

Or you may be cool with the message and still consider Waugh a crank.

Anthony Eden, British foreign minister in 1953. Waugh credits the Conservative politician for co-sponsoring a popular euthanasia drive in Love Among The Ruins. "The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children. Foreigners came in such numbers to take advantage of the service that immigration authorities now turned back the bearers of single tickets." Image from https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/anthony-eden-3633.php. 

The story is replete with images of a forlorn existence, leavened only by sarcasm:

“…My mother and father hanged themselves in their own backyard with their own clothesline. Now no one will lift a finger to help himself.”

…Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity.

…He had made a desert in his imagination which he might call peace.

Love Among The Ruins is quickly over and not that memorable. The ending is both predictable and flat, by far the weakest thing in the story. Like the romance between Miles and Clara, it is designed for instant satisfaction, not long-term engagement.

Waugh was actually a master satirist but a better writer, something he had long ago demonstrated by the time Love Among The Ruins came out. The novella may step into the future, but for Waugh it is more of a dip into his past; amusing, provoking, but not so essential.