Importance of Being Evelyn

THE FOXGLOVE SAGA (252 pp.)--Auberon Waugh--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

"You are going to suffer a lot of irritation," wrote Graham Greene to the author, "when reviewers compare you to Evelyn." The reader turning to this novel is likely to suffer not so much irritation as a double take: the man staring from the dust jacket is the image of young Evelyn Waugh; the style and subject matter belong to Evelyn Waugh. But the author's name is Auberon, and he is 22 instead of 57.

Other literary sons--John Phillips Marquand, Nathaniel Benchley, Klaus Mann --have tried with indifferent success to write like Dad. Auberon Waugh conies closer than any of them to pulling it off: at first glance, The Foxglove Saga could pass for a sequel to Decline and Fall. Like Evelyn's first novel, The Saga opens in an English boys' school and is a picaresque, loosely jointed account of several old school chums as they lurch through a succession of army camps, prisons, hospitals and asylums. The characters are often almost the same as in Decline and Fall: for the wealthy Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde and her brattish son Peter, Auberon substitutes the wealthy Lady Julia Foxglove and her brattish son Martin; for the loutish Percy Clutterbuck there is the loutish Kenneth Stout; for the sycophantic Dr. Augustus Fagan there is the sycophantic Brother Aloysius. Even the scenes in The Saga are hauntingly familiar: a garden party that is entertained by the Bidcombe Platinum Band recalls the garden party of Decline and Fall, with its Llanabba Silver Band. And Auberon has both his father's love of fantastic Dickensian names (Percy-Scroop-Beauchamp, Nurse Proudfoot, Mrs. Cod-Finger) and his hilarious sense of incongruity.

But his father's titled ghosts seem oddly dated in Welfare State England. Moreover, there is something lacking--the figure of the innocent but virtuous hero (Paul Penny feather of Decline and Fall, Adam Fenwick-Symes of Vile Bodies) whose reasoned view of an unreasoning world gave a special cutting edge to the elder Waugh's comedy. Auberon says he has no interest in being a professional novelist. He wrote The Foxglove Saga because it was what was expected of him in a literary family (his father wrote Decline and Fall at 25, and his Uncle Alec wrote Loom of Youth at 19). So "when Father told me, 'My boy, it is time you wrote your first book,' I took it in my stride."

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