Book Report

I recently read this book and really enjoyed it. It is both about a small country in Africa and an Englishman named Basil Seal. Basil is the main character in many of Evelyn Waugh's books, he is sort of a worldly bon vivant that has fallen into a the position of High Commissioner& Comptroller of the Ministry of Modernisation and being helped by an Armenian named Krikor Youkoumian. They came up with strange new laws and policies that the backward country was not prepared for. This was such a funny book, I was reading it on the Max about Youkoumian who was able to find Basil at the train station and got him a seat on the train by moving his wife to the livestock car and giving her a jar of cherries, I laughed out loud at that.

Modernisation eventually became too much for Basil, the Emperor had attended Oxford where he had briefly met Basil, and was prone to thinking up new ways to modernize his country. Everyday it was something new for Basil to try to figure out how to write a new policy/law, from statewide morning exercises and community singing to a ill conceived birth control pageant. The final straw was when the Emperor started printing his own money and his uncle who had been chained in a cave was 'resurrected' and made Emperor.