Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh

This is the second book (after Men at Arms) in Waugh's epic of military inefficiency, and I liked it more than the first book, probably because of the hilarious opening in which the clubs in Piccadilly are being bombed out during the blitz, and everyone in them is concentrating on drinking and club rivalry. Still, I don't enjoy these novels as much as Waugh's 1930s ones; I find them less amusing and I'm not particularly interested in the army (even though the amount of military action that happens in these books is close to none). I sort of drowned in the endless acronyms and antiquated jargon, but Waugh's characters and deadpan satire are delightful nevertheless, and the use of irony is particularly sharp in this book. I feel a sort of fascinated dread about what's going to happen in the last book, since things are beginning to look pretty black for the eternally oblivious and somewhat pathetic Guy, who has gotten himself accidentally entangled in all sorts of things he does not even know about. There's a good tension of satire and seriousness as well; one of the best little narrative strands involves Guy, blindly following his instructions, taking an identification disk from the body of a dead soldier, and feeling it his duty to return it to his family. He becomes almost weirdly attached to this object, which he keeps with him throughout his own ghastly experiences, and then gives it to a well-connected acquaintance whom he trusts to deliver it to the right people. She promptly drops it in the waste paper basket. Little stories of this sort were my favourite parts of the book, I wish there had been more of that and less bewildering slang and jargon.