PATH OF DALLIANCE

by Auberon Waugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 1964

Auberon Waugh who has inherited much more than a name from his father has written a second (The Foxglove Saga - 1961) sporadic satire of life in England. True, Mr. Waugh's path of dalliance is more prim than primrose or passion flower strewn; undergraduate life at Oxford, with which this is largely concerned, often reveals a cleanshaven naivete (i.e. Sligger, one of the principals here, and his friends, all remain in close touch with their mentor at their old school, Brother Richard, and their letters are full of snitching confidences). However, now at Oxford, Jamey Sligger, a handsome, amiable sort, attempts to achieve more than ""intermittent physical contact"" with Anne Heatherington, a girl who is more alert to political and social commitments. Through her he becomes involved in a progressive group engaged in fighting ""nuclear warfare, the South Africans, the Americans, the French Fascists and Reactionaries"" and of course the college proctors. There's a dormitory party and a fire; a suicide; an unwed mother laying the Price; and, at the close, some assorted, arrant nonsense in which Sligger's mother's boisterous Liberalism and advocacy of the ""proper use of sex"" are manifest.... crappily episodic, this still brings within the range of Waugh's vision all kinds of moral, social and political astigmatism, and its humor is sly and spry.

Pub Date: July 13, 1964

ISBN: 0755105540

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1964

Categories: FICTION