Daren
This Penguin 70 collect two excerpts from Evelyn Waugh's Remote People, a book that I read around 10 years ago and enjoyed. I remarked in my review of that book that the description of the Coronation was fairly minimal, and it seems the rest of the book was superior to that section.
Collected here in an excerpt, the Coronation read quite well. Waugh was quite descriptive and provided a little background and explained who all the main characters were. He shared a fair amount of behind the scenes logistics and gossip from the other journalists. I probably enjoyed this excerpt more this time around.
The second much shorter excerpt was one I would consider poorly selected. It had little context, not even sharing his location in Africa at the start, was principally a moan about boredom and whether boredom at home in England would remind him of his journey, or whether the journal he kept would read as boring when at home. In the end it turns out he was on a 4 day train journey to Djibouti, missed his connecting steamer and then explained some (fairly boring at it turned out) logistics in finding a new ship.
3 stars - albeit would have been 4 stars but the second excerpt dragged it down!
This Penguin 70 collect two excerpts from Evelyn Waugh's Remote People, a book that I read around 10 years ago and enjoyed. I remarked in my review of that book that the description of the Coronation was fairly minimal, and it seems the rest of the book was superior to that section.
Collected here in an excerpt, the Coronation read quite well. Waugh was quite descriptive and provided a little background and explained who all the main characters were. He shared a fair amount of behind the scenes logistics and gossip from the other journalists. I probably enjoyed this excerpt more this time around.
The second much shorter excerpt was one I would consider poorly selected. It had little context, not even sharing his location in Africa at the start, was principally a moan about boredom and whether boredom at home in England would remind him of his journey, or whether the journal he kept would read as boring when at home. In the end it turns out he was on a 4 day train journey to Djibouti, missed his connecting steamer and then explained some (fairly boring at it turned out) logistics in finding a new ship.
3 stars - albeit would have been 4 stars but the second excerpt dragged it down!