Nothing prepares one for the spritely acid bath of Evelyn Waugh’s third novel less than reading it after his first two novels. Yes, those are black comedies, too, but there’s something extra-chilling about the whimsical savagery found here, where life is cheap and violence constant.
Off the coast of northeastern Africa, the island nation of Azania stands athwart the march of progress, its people enmeshed in bloody feuds and quick scams. Seth, the new emperor, seeks to change that by looking to to Europe for inspiration. He happens upon a mash-up of Marxism and family planning that blows up sooner than you can say: “THROUGH STERILITY TO CULTURE.”
Counting on the help of an opportunistic Brit, Basil Seal, Seth’s road to nowhere implicates both Africans and Europeans as well as the hope they might have anything to learn from each other.
The Emperor remains steadfast in his folly:
“I am Seth, grandson of Amarath. Defeat is impossible. I have been to Europe. I know. We have the Tank. This is not a war of Seth against Seyid but of Progress against Barbarism. And progress must prevail.”
It’s a point Waugh sends up often in a book that directs its fire equally at colonialism and progressivism while finding time to recycle the author’s scathing critique of the English upper classes. People meet tragic ends in both Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, but here human suffering on a broader scale is played out with cynical detachment. The breezy tone alone can leave a mark.
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| The two native tribes of Azania, the Wanda and Sakuyu, have a history of violent clashes they put aside temporarily to welcome their new Emperor Seth. "...war-drums could often be heard inland and sometimes the whole hillside would be aflame with burning villages." Image from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/apr/26/ludwig-jindra-saharan-africa-1930s-in-pictures |
All this gets served with an arc of true dramatic tension. As successful as Waugh’s earlier books are, they are in essence collections of anecdotes. In Black Mischief you get an adventure story delivered with political nuance and suspense. The canvas is well filled out; Waugh’s island nation of Azania comes complete with its own map.
Black Mischief is not a safe book; it delves into racial and political divides as wide now as then and lets you know its author isn’t aboard for any of that 21st-century sensitivity rot. Despite or perhaps because of this it is a good book, perhaps a great book, and worthy of your time.
In many ways, Black Mischief reminded me of V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas. Both feature black protagonists, Seth and Jimmy, who suffer from a shared desire to emulate progressive white European thinking. Both befriend white characters who operate with mixed motives in societies which veer between colonial exploitation and jungle savagery.
Jimmy is motivated by sexual frustration and a narcissistic self-image. For Seth, it is shame at the ways of his people and how they compare to what he witnessed as a student at Oxford, a university also attended by Basil Seal (and in real life, by Waugh). Seth sees Basil as the missing piece to realizing his dream of a modern, Westernized Azania:
Three years had intervened during which Seth had become Emperor, but Basil still stood for him as the personification of all that glittering, intangible Western culture to which he aspired.
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| Women's suffrage is one of several modern ideas Seth is taken by as he sets about reinventing his homeland along Western ideals. "Here have I spent four weeks trying to enforce the edict prescribing trousers for the official classes, and now I read that it is more modern not to wear any at all," he sighs. Image from https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default/Unisa-History-and-Memory-Project/Archive/Federal-university |
Basil sees in Seth another meal ticket, having stolen his mother’s jewelry and run out on his debts back home. In no time, he is scamming the Azanian army for boots they cannot wear (they become rations instead), just as westerners before him sold Seth a tank that cannot be driven (it is used instead for torturing prisoners in hot weather.)
Seth is the book’s main figure, its tragicomic heart, but Basil would be the one to reappear in other Waugh works, all the way to his last long-form fiction in 1962. Basil Seal was a perfect antihero to foster Waugh’s cruelest larks. Over time, there was a softening of Basil as Waugh grew fonder of his creation, but Black Mischief gives us Seal as an unalloyed charlatan who hurts all who trust him.
The other subplots lean more into pure comedy, though with a dollop of the same cynicism. Two Englishwomen arrive at Azania to put an end to animal cruelty; Seth, always eager to impress Westerners, greets them with a multi-course meal of succulent meats and poultry.
The leader of the pair, Dame Mildred, tries to throw scraps of food to stray dogs, only to be annoyed when starving children snatch them instead. She writes in her journal: Disembarked Matodi 12.45. Quaint and smelly. Condition of mules and dogs appalling, also children.
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| A map of Azania was prepared for Black Mischief's first edition. It tracks very well with Waugh's narrative, particularly what becomes a critical road between the coastal capital, Matodi, and the strategic central city of Debra-Dowa. Image from https://staffblogs.le.ac.uk/waughandwords/2015/11/20/blackmischief/ |
Black Mischief is not a popular Waugh novel today. It frequently uses racist language, sometimes but not always in service of mocking white attitudes. One character, the mistress of Azania’s white army commander, goes by the unfortunate name “Black Bitch.”
In its own day, Black Mischief triggered a strongly negative reaction from Catholics, one of whom labeled it “a disgrace.” Waugh, himself a Catholic, offered no public protest to this but would go back to mocking Africans in later works, sometimes in ways that are truly awful.
I don’t believe Black Mischief is bad that way at all. Waugh is criticized for being narrow-minded, yet as a young writer (not yet 30) you can appreciate how leaving England expanded his horizons. As with his prior travel book on Africa, Remote People, his attitude is prone to generalization but also receptive and engaged in a way that deepens the reading experience. He had great antennae for his surroundings.
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| On the grounds of an ancient Nestorian Christian monastery in Azania, an old man is found living in a cave to challenge the reign of Seth. Above, the historic Ethiopian shrine of Debre Libanos, which Waugh visited and which is reflected in Black Mischief. Image from https://www.viator.com/tours/Addis-Ababa/Guided-Day-Trip-Nature-and-Wildlife-including-Debre-Libanos-Monastery-from-Addis-Ababa/d24099-40378P5 |
At several points he taps into the mindset of the people of Azania, a cultural melting pot that draws a multitude of ethnicities:
There was no room for a gentleman in Matodi nowadays, they remarked. You could not recount an anecdote in the streets or pause on the water front to discuss with full propriety the sale of land or the pedigree of a stallion, but you were jostled against the wall by black men or Indians, dirty fellows with foreskins; unbelievers, descendants of slaves; judges from up country, upstarts, jacks-in-office giving decisions against you in the courts... Jews foreclosing on mortgages... taxation... vulgar display... no respect of leisure, hanging up wretched little flags everywhere, clearing up the streets, moving derelict motor cars while their owners were not in a position to defend them.
Again, this reads like a Naipaul novel written 50 years later.
Waugh’s travels in Africa in 1930 and 1931 informed Black Mischief in many ways. Seth was drawn in part by Haile Selassie, the Abyssinian leader Waugh saw up close (and wasn’t impressed by, despite the admiration Selassie basked in from other Western visitors.) There is also Azania’s British colony, shaped by Waugh’s up-close observations of Kenya’s “Happy Valley” enclave of white settlers.
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| A sampling from the "Happy Valley" set of aristocratic Brits who settled in central Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s. Living away from the United Kingdom, they were infamous for reported promiscuity and drug use. In 1987, the movie White Mischief drew on their story. Image from https://www.utterlyinteresting.com/post/the-happy-valley-set-colonial-debauchery-in-kenya-s-highlands#google_vignette |
Waugh actually liked the Happy Valley set, a point he makes at length in Remote People. Here the British come off as amusing idiots at best. “This war is too exasperating,” a woman sighs. “I’ve been expecting the wool for baby’s jacket for six weeks.”
The British ambassador to Azania, Sir Samson, doesn’t realize how his appointment reflects his low stature back at the Foreign Office. Daughter Prudence has a fling with Sir Samson’s feckless assistant, until her shallow attentions are diverted by the ravishingly amoral Basil.
There is a lot going on in Black Mischief, another reason to enjoy it. I would call the British ambassador subplot the weakest, since it retreads material covered better in Waugh’s earlier novels. But at least that part is resolved in a joltingly memorable way.
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| Basil Seal arriving in Azania as drawn by Waugh for the novel's first edition. A ruthless operator for his own interests, Seal stands out from the other feckless Britons who popular Black Mischief. Image from https://www.jonkers.co.uk/rare-book/7957/black-mischief/evelyn-waugh |
The escapades of other Europeans are more original and amusing. Basil is assisted in his exploitation of Seth by an Armenian hotelier named Krikor Youkoumian, a sleazy operator who lives by his wits. He is the instigator of the bad-boots deal. As Seth goes hard on educating his people on the value of not having any children, angering religious leaders and confusing everyone else, Youkoumian sighs to Basil: “He’ll discover every damn modern thing if we don’t find him a woman damn quick.” Alas, one thing about Seth is he’s not in it for the nookie.
Waugh treats Seth as mockable, but there is an air of real nobility about him, too. He is presented as courageous, deeply hurt by constant disloyalty from others and not at all venial. Where he messes up, he does so from trying to be too Western, without quite getting the details right, as seen when he throws a formal dinner:
“…Highness, is it proper to serve the Minister of the Interior with more wine? He is pouring it in his lady’s lap.”
“It is proper. You ask questions like an idiot.”
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| A first edition of Black Mischief includes the royal seal of Emperor Seth on the cover. Waugh wrote it after returning from Africa gathering material for both it and his earlier travel book Remote People. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mischief |
Throughout the novel, there are various sidetrips taken, including a running vignette about a family who make their home in a derelict van abandoned on a major roadway and struggle with authorities not to be evicted. Ultimately, steps to progress bring only casualties.
Black Mischief begins and ends on the same beautiful image of night over Azania’s capital, Matodi, and “the soft, barely perceptible lapping of the water along the sea-wall.” As with Naipaul, there is a helpless cyclicality at work, a sense that nothing ever changes in this distant land and European involvement only makes things worse, which may have triggered Waugh’s Catholic critics back when the book was new. Today I suspect the idea would bother other groups even more.
Waugh
had his ups and downs writing about foreign cultures, but Black Mischief
never bores or embarrasses with its jaded attitude. He is repurposing his
African experience in a way that tells a good story while making observations
on the human condition that remain fresh and bold.
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