Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh

So, I have finally reached the end of the chronicle of Guy Crouchback's misadventures during the Second World War. I think this book was the easiest read of the three (much less military jargon and insular humour), but, as with the first one, I was annoyed by Waugh's sincerity about religion. I really felt like he was trying to shove Roman Catholicism down his readers' throats, it was too heavy-handed. I really enjoyed some of the book, the absurdity was utterly delightful at time, and Waugh plays little games with readers, such as having the repercussions of something happening hundreds of miles away be felt by completely unconnected people, who have no idea why it is happening, and it's fun to draw those connections. For example, there is a 'doctor' who is hired to give the Gestapo bad dreams, he orders scorpions to be brought to him and demands why they're not here yet, while in a totally different section of the book, another character comes across a man in a hospital who went insane because he had been ordered to deliver scorpions, which escaped. There are a lot of ridiculous connections like that, which make the world of the army a kind of tight-knit, mutually dependent and ineffectual system. I liked Guy Crouchback a lot more in this book than in the others, I suppose he seemed less pathetic and more sort of desperately honourable in a callous world. What really surprised me about these books is that although they are war novels, the war is always somewhere else. There is almost no action depicted, most violence tends to occur during bungled training exercises and various retreats or advances that happen through misunderstanding and miscommunication. The army seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the actual war.