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Black Mischief
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
Black Mischief, Waugh's third novel, helped to establish his reputation as a master satirist. Set on the fictional African island of Azania, the novel chronicles the efforts of Emperor Seth, assisted by the Englishman Basil Seal, to modernize his kingdom. Profound hilarity ensues from the issuance of homemade currency, the staging of a "Birth Control Gala", the rightful ruler's demise at his own rather long and tiring coronation ceremonies, and a good deal more mischief.
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Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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Cather's writing is impeccable
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The Mark of the Beast
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When a carousing Englishman disgraces the consecrated effigy of Hanuman, a leprous "Silver Man" marks him with a hideous curse. The ensuing night brings new terrors to the house of the doomed man.
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Must listen again
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In a historical classic as enthralling as a novel, author Jim Bishop colorfully depicts the city of Washington as it is celebrating the end of the Civil War. With research carefully gathered over 25 years, he weaves details together so skillfully, that even though you know the outcome, the suspense heightens with each unfolding event. It’s Good Friday, April 14, 1865. While all around him, people demand vengeance on the subdued southern states, the President plans to rebuild demolished cities and send captured Secessionist soldiers home to plant their crops.
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Vivacious, young Hester Christie tries to run her home like clockwork, as would befit the wife of British Army officer, Tim Christie. However hard Mrs Tim strives for seamless living amidst the other army wives, she is always moving flat-out to remember groceries, rule lively children, side-step village gossip and placate her husband with bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade. Left alone for months at a time whilst her husband is with his regiment, Mrs Tim resolves to keep a diary of events large and small in her family life.
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Life as a military wife
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A 40-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as an historic Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions - and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosie - enters into the company of the historic luminaries.
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Little Big Woman
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Night Soldiers
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New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.
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Best Alan Furst novel!
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Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pankot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny of their imposing landlady threatens to upset the quiet rhythm of their days.
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A Pleasant Meander
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The Winds of War
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Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - and all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.
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A Masterpiece
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Around the World with Auntie Mame
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Encore, Encore! The brilliant sequel to the smash bestseller Auntie Mame is back and the reviews are in....
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A classic!
- By Miss Right on 03-22-22
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At least one chapter missing
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A wonderful depiction of the nastiness of hallucinations
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MORE than actual print book!
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Extraordinary
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Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, is the daring and hilarious tale of Paul Pennyfeather, a theology student expelled from Oxford and sent to teach at a private boys’ school in Wales. Previously a modest young man, Paul finds himself a bit out of place amongst the teachers of Llanabba, who are all misfits, fools, and derelicts themselves: Prendy (the anxious) and Captain Grimes (the drunk), just to name two.
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Set in the 19th century against a backdrop of island life and the vast surrounding seas, A High Wind in Jamaica is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them back to England following a hurricane in the postcolonial Caribbean they call home. Having set sail, the children quickly fall into the hands of pirates. As their voyage continues, things take an awful turn
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Prose that reads like a Child's Fever Dream
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What listeners say about Black Mischief
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John L. Murphy
- 10-27-19
Has this dated well?
Frankly, I chose this based on Michael Maloney, who reads far too few classic titles on Audible. He''s done others by Evelyn Waugh. He's suited well for the antic nature of that author's prose and predicaments within which he places his smart set.
Does this hold up? Better than Scoop, also read by MM, to my surprise. Waugh here is a bit more controlled and the plot hangs together more convincingly. Sure, there's satire, but it's directed at both the whites and the blacks, on this colonial African outpost. It gets silly with a very extended subplot all about promoting contraception, of all things. Makes me curious how Waugh took this, but after all, around this time I recall the Church of England debating the morality of this technological innovation, too.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lawrence Stasyszen
- 02-19-23
Period Piece but Classic
Certainly the subject matter of this humorous and bittersweet commentary on English manners and colonial perspective is dated and would not be received well in present times. But the story is filled with humor, irony, and memorable characters, both English and African. The star of this production, is just as much the narrator. Michael Maloney does a tremendous job with the characters, the pace of the story, and the tone of the dark humor. Not one of Evelyn Waugh’s better known works, but certainly a terrific read and listen.
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1 person found this helpful
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- ECWalter
- 06-19-19
Waugh's funniest novel
One of the funniest openings you'll ever hear. The English, French, Africans, and more are ruthlessly skewered.
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2 people found this helpful
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- LizaJane
- 02-09-15
Waugh's best, superbly performed
Would you consider the audio edition of Black Mischief to be better than the print version?
Yes, chiefly because of Michael Maloney's marvelous reading.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Black Mischief?
Hard to pick just one. Certainly memorable, if horrendous, is the scene where the trader Youkoumian returns home from being kidnapped and goes to bed refusing to untie his poor wife who is was trussed up by the kidnappers hours before and lies in agony in her bonds.
What does Michael Maloney bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
His mellifluous accents made every sentence a seductive delight, and the suave and sinister voice he gives to that rakish anti-hero Basil Seal was absolutely irresistable. Other characters as well, for instance the middle aged upper-class Englishwomen, are given voices that are utterly convincing and hilarious.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No. It is too rich and horrifying a feast for that.
Any additional comments?
Perhaps it is among Waugh's black comedies even too black for most readers. However, one must point out that the European characters hardly come off as more admirable than the Africans. His other African novel, Scoop, is much admired, though probably not more politically incorrect than Black Mischief.
But what most of all causes me to consider it Waugh's best is his hero, Basil Seal. One might reasonably say that Seal if the only true hero Waugh ever created, since his novels tend to be centered on the catastrophic experiences of a young man who is no more than a cipher. Basil Seal is alive and active in his ruthless and egoistic adventures. We first meet him when in order to finance a trip to Africa, he steals his mother's emeralds. Hardly a cipher, this one.
His other appearance, in Put Out More Flags, is also read by Michael Maloney, and I intend to purchase it even though I already have a version read by someone else.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 03-06-20
Wonderful narrator
This is one of Waugh's more cynical views on mankind's foibles and very funny. The self-serving Basil Seal attempts to cope with a newly minted emperor's overreaching ambitions of bringing a primitive African province into modernity with disasterous results for almost all.
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- John
- 10-01-16
Raucous, Not Racist
Yes, I know that at the time of its publication, this book gave Waugh a bad name among the keepers of Catholic culture in England. Being still something of a besieged minority it’s not hard to understand their feelings. As the editor of England’s leading Catholic magazine put it, “it would not be fair on The Tablet’s part to condemn coarseness and foulness in non-Catholic writers while glossing over equally outrageous lapses in those who are, or are supposed to be, our co-religionists…”
The mouthpiece for the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, The Tablet was highly respected on all sides. At a time when the Index of Prohibited Books was something more than merely a helpful guide to better literature, both Waugh and his readers were facing possible excommunication. As a Catholic myself, I can’t pass that off lightly.
But then there is the basic fact that the book is hilarious. As R. J. Stove put it a few years ago in The American Spectator, “In a million English breasts there contended the sentiments of ‘That chap Waugh’s gone too far this time’ and ‘I say, my dear, did you read the chapter about what happens to Prudence? Haven’t laughed so much in months.’”
And times change. The Tablet was outraged by scenes of cannibalism it mistook for a parody of the Eucharist and a Festival of Contraception misread as Waugh’s endorsement of the practice. Modern eyes are far more sensitive to the “n-word” and racial stereotypes. But , as in the case of Huckleberry Finn, the dust raised by all that moral indignation may blind us to the fact that in Black Mischief nasty jabs abound on every side. This is satire, after all. The European characters come off as just as hopeless as the emperor and his subjects. They are greedy, self-centered, lazy, boorish, pampered. The British government can’t even be bothered to send a competent representative. That doesn’t stop the French envoy, true to his Gallic roots, from assuming every British bumble—half the time they can’t even locate their cypher book—is a cunning gambit in a subtle game of diplomatic chess. And for all his genial raffishness, Basil Seal is the kind of character who can be loved only from the safe distance of the printed page.
No, what I’ve always suspected lay behind all the bluster about the novel’s racism is anger over—and fear of the accuracy of—Waugh’s wider satire of the entire Modern Progressive agenda. As stated earlier, times change, and now “Progress”—the real target of the novel—has swept to victory. So much so that the telling irony of Dame Mildred—a woman right in step with the Festival of Contraception but horrified at the idea of an ox getting bruised—could go unnoticed by many modern readers. For me, at least, Black Mischief is something of an antidote to our limping, craven, speech-code-ridden existence—an excursion outside the collegiate “safe space” with its teddy bears and crayons.
Besides, Waugh had already unleashed his wit on the West in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. And, while those books definitely leave a mark, by setting his third effort in Azania the devastation wrought by our modern experiments against reality (Roger Kimball’s coinage) stands out even more starkly. As the Anglican bishop says when asked to weigh in on Azania’s birth control controversy, his parishioners (i.e.: the British population on the island) are already familiar with the use of those devices, so continuing to use them won’t harm anyone. It’s the people of Azania, lead by their churches, which reject the concept. True, Seth’s empire has its shortcomings: army boots are assumed to be extra rations and Soviet-style posters promoting birth control are misinterpreted as promises of familial fecundity. Some of the mischief is indigenous: cannibalism, for example, or the mass murder of siblings with a better claim to power. But the majority of the mischief isn’t “black” because it’s coming from an island off the East African coast. It’s “black” because it’s being imported to that island by its well-meaning emperor from an increasingly misguided, corrupt and “progressive” European civilization.
Michael Maloney serves it all up with voice work that expresses the tone and intent of the novel to a nicety. At times his performance can crack your earphones; I’m certain the audio engineer had a time trying to equalize some of Dame Mildred’s lines. And some words get swallowed up in the accents of other characters, especially those who, like Mr. Youkoumian, speak rapidly. But overall the reading is a superb example of what can happen when the right talent is given the right book.
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- Mr D
- 11-15-15
Not of our time
The story jars at times as it does not fit with our modern perception of racism, but fundamentally the story is a hilarious account of the characters depicted.
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