Sword of Honor - Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh doesn’t give us exciting heroes. The worlds he sketches are too full of cynicism, decay, and dissipation for shining personalities or unambiguous moral champions. But occasionally he gives us someone that we can get behind, a deeply flawed character who struggles mightily with issues of morality and faith and who eventually sacrifices personal happiness to do his duty.

Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Waugh’s 1950s “Sword of Honor” trilogy, is a specimen of this breed. When the middle-aged gentleman is introduced, he seems unlikely to do anything interesting. The only surviving son of an ancient but dwindling Anglo-Catholic family, Guy lives in self-imposed exile, completely removed from his friends and relations while his estranged wife marries and divorces a string of wealthier and more fashionable men.

The onset of World War II provides Guy one last chance at redemption and glory, but he soon finds the military to be full of cowards and lunatics, endlessly scheming against each other for their own narrow ends. For most of the first two books in the trilogy, Guy’s life is a series of near-successes that turn into miserable failures, as he is manipulated by forces beyond his control.

But in the long run—and over his three books, Waugh is able to establish that long run—Guy comes out on top by virtue of his devotion to duty. He is surrounded by men who are smarter, cleverer, and more ambitious than he, but Waugh eventually brings each of them to grief, and often to death or insanity. Guy adheres to traditions which sometimes he does not fully understand but in whose goodness he has deep faith.

The beauty of the trilogy comes through Guy’s internal struggles to reject the temptations of fame and glory in order to cleave to rules and strictures that seem to do him only harm. In Guy’s eventual attainment of happiness, Waugh crafts a condemnation of a modernity that discards traditions simply for the sake of discarding them, a modernity he paints as disordered and disconnected.

The dry wit and fantastic characters for which Waugh is famous neatly counterbalance the enormity of Guy’s personal journey, as Waugh raises questions about progress and society that seem just as relevant and countercultural today as they did 50 years ago.