The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy [Paperback]

"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!

The cynicism of the poet, his incisive look and revealing insights on the alienation of the other characters are as effective to unmask the Hollywood society of his time as to confront similar realities nowadays. In some way the book is related with Orwell's "1984" and "Animal farm". "The loved one" is a glance to the banality and fatuity that can punish, as the worst of tyrannies, the life of ordinary people.