Auberon Waugh, Novelist: 4

 My enjoyable stroll through the all but forgotten novels of Auberon Waugh is nearing its end. Of the five published (between 1960 and 1972), I have now read four. Having greatly enjoyed the third, Who Are the Violets Now?, I was hoping that number four, Consider the Lilies (1968), might be even more fun. Sadly, it was not to be: after a promising start, Consider the Lilies never quite builds into a satisfying novel. Perhaps the problem is that Waugh is here, uncharacteristically, writing in the first person, taking us inside the head of his narrator and obliging us to see everything through his worse than jaundiced eyes. This opens up possibilities for Waugh the satirist but cramps the style of Waugh the novelist. After a while, this particular first person ceases to be as much fun as he initially promised to be.
   Nicholas Trumpeter is a youngish clergyman taking up a new living which is in the gift of an enigmatic, extremely rich financier, whose disenchanted view of the world looks almost benign in comparison with Nicholas's bottomless cynicism. Trumpeter seems to regard the church he is supposedly serving as a dead letter, good only for functioning as a minor branch of the social services and endorsing whatever causes and grievances are fashionable at any given moment. Nicholas is certainly happy to fling himself into this cause in order to advance his career, or at least keep it afloat, mouthing sociological platitudes, calling on 'the government' to do something about such issues du jour as inflammable nighties, old aged pensioners' dance halls and, of course, the needs of 'young people'. (This is not entirely unfair as a satirical portrait of the Church of England in the Sixties.) Nicholas is in fact quite uninterested in the work of the church, or the most basic requirements of his position, and would happily spend his time reading detective novels (while complaining about being overworked). 
   And then there is Gillian, Nicholas's wife and a most vexing thorn in his side. An old-fashioned atheist and serious believer in all the politically correct views of the time, she is also, according to our none too reliable narrator, physically unattractive, shrewish and entirely humourless. Nicholas's loathing for her has now reached such a pitch that he is actively considering bumping her off in some relatively humane and undetectable way.  As an added bonus, such an outcome would leave him free to carry on his affair with the cassock-chasing daughter of his patron...
   Nicholas Trumpeter, then, is not a nice man; indeed he could be classed as a borderline psychopath. And yet, for much of the time, his disarming frankness, his eye for absurdity and his sheer shamelessness make him surprisingly agreeable company – especially as he narrates, perforce, in the elegant, limpid, ironically inflected prose of his creator. In the early chapters at least, there are good laughs to be had from the dark comedy that unfolds, especially from the antics of Nicholas's more or less deranged clerical colleagues. However, I found as the story went on that the narrator's all-embracing cynicism and absolute self-absorption tended to drain the life out of everything and everyone else around him. Waugh pulls it all together at the end with a couple of narrative moves that serve to wrap things up and reveal the full extent of Nicholas's delusions, but Consider the Lilies does not show Waugh fils at his best, and there is something of a pot-boiler feel to it. Perhaps, however, the creation of Nicholas Trumpeter played its part in the genesis of Waugh's classic Diaries; there are passages where Nicholas sounds uncannily like the persona adopted by Waugh for that other, very different exercise in fiction.  
   And that leaves me with just one more Waugh to go – A Bed of Flowers (1972). I'll be sorry when this little excursion is over.