When the Going Was Good

This is Waugh's own selection from the four books of travel writing he published between 1930 and 1936. In his 1945 Preface to this volume, he looks back with nostalgia to a time when he had '...no fixed home and no fixed possessions...' and was simply able to travel continuously. The whole book is permeated with his sadness that his own disillusioning experiences in the Second World War and the new post-war landscape of displaced populations mean that he will no longer travel again, especially with the innocence and energy that he had in his youth. And indeed he never did, retreating with his large family into the life of a Tory squire with an almost parodic hatred of foreigners. Waugh's travels here span the years 1929-1935 and include a trip around the Mediterranean, a train journey to Abyssinia, for Haile Selassie's coronation, further travels in Africa, then to South America and a return journey to Addis Ababa to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Arranged chronologically, his journeys which he also fictionalised in novels such as Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938) trace his own route from innocence to experience and frivolity to bitterness. Waugh's writing in this book is opinionated, sardonic, witty, often hilarious. By focusing his merciless eye on the quirks and human oddities of other cultures he somehow plunged the reader right into the middle of the scene. Sometimes, with his views of race, class and gender, he seems a man of his time, not ours, then you find his mordant wit and depth of insight have been directed towards the English, and finally, self-depracatingly, onto himself. Waugh's travel writing belongs with the work of other great 20th-century travellers and storytellers such as Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, who narrated a world now irrevocably changed. (Kirkus UK)