Evelyn Waugh’s most famous travel book is celebrated more than it is actually read, a good thing for the writer’s reputation as actually reading Waugh In Abyssinia exposes his worst traits: indifference to human suffering, a tendency to boredom, and a badly blinkered mindset.
It’s not only that he comes out strongly in favor of the Italian occupation of the land known today as Ethiopia, but the bland, superficial way he makes his points. As fascist apologia, it’s rather wan.
Reading it today does sting, as he justifies Mussolini’s broadly condemned 1935 invasion as the natural result of Abyssinian truculence and lassitude. Waugh exposes here a disdain for non-European people he did better to conceal in other writings, even if his main target is the European liberal elite who condemned the invasion after their own countries enriched themselves the same way decades before.
