Black Mischief

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Condition remarks:Book: AcceptableJacket: Worn/faded, no tearsPages: Tanning and foxingMarkings: Ex-library with usual markingsSet against the backdrop of a fictional African empir e teetering on the edge of modernity, Black Mischief is a razor-sharp satirical novel that chronicles the catastrophic reign of the Oxford-educated Emperor Seth, who enlists his hapless English friend Basil Seal to drag his crumbling nation into the twentieth century. What follows is a brilliantly absurd collision of Western idealism and imperial chaos, as grand schemes for birth control, modernisation, and progress unravel with spectacular and darkly comic consequences. Waugh presents a world where civilisation and savagery are uncomfortably interchangeable, skewering the pretensions of both the coloniser and the colonised with equal, merciless wit. Published in 1932, Black Mischief stands as one of Waugh's most audacious early works, illustrating his gift for savage comedy and his unflinching eye for human folly. Drawing on his own travels in Abyssinia, Waugh constructs a narrative rich in irony and moral ambiguity, anticipating many of the post-colonial anxieties that would dominate literary discourse for decades to come. His prose is precise, elegantly cruel, and laced with a cynicism that never quite conceals a deeper, more unsettling truth — leaving the reader to wonder whether progress is ever truly possible, or merely the grandest mischief of all. Show more