SOURCE: “Africa, Europe, and the Dreary Future,” in The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, University of Washington Press, 1966, pp. 148–56.

In the following excerpt, Carens examines the postwar novellas Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, noting their bleak pessimism and defeatist sentiments.

Two grim, short political satires with none of Scoop's ebullience or consolation—Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins—followed the Second World War. The first of these recounts the visit of Scott-King, Classical Master at Granchester for twenty-one years, to a mythical totalitarian state called Neutralia. The second satire was in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984; Waugh's inverted Utopia depicted a fully socialized England of the near future. Both works are bleakly pessimistic in outlook.

The form of Scott-King's Modern Europe resembles that of Scoop; the opening and conclusion of the novel, which place Scott-King at Granchester, frame the confusions...