It was the name on the spine that caught my attention. I discovered the writing of Waugh’s grandfather, Evelyn Waugh when I was in college after encountering a mention of him in Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape.
The elder Waugh, like Greene, was notable as an author who had converted to Catholicism and who had brought a great deal of religious sensibility to his work. The faith, however, did not continue long in the family with Waugh’s son Auberon growing detached from the church and Alexander appears to be even further estranged from the faith.
The resulting book is irreverent, although its attempts at humor often miss the mark with Waugh taking aim at the simple apparent contradictions of the Bible, choosing his citations in a way to emphasize the absurdity of God. From the blurbs on the book, I had expected something more nuanced and compelling, but instead it came across as being something at the level of a clever college student writing on the topic. Perhaps Waugh should have taken the offer his father made to pay him the amount of the advance to not write the book.
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