Customer Reviews

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: Stage Play (Plays)

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If there are any aspiring writers of comic novels out there then I earnestly entreat you to have a quick read of this book. Writing humour is never easy but here is the great Evelyn Waugh showing how to do it. Not a word out of place, the mot juste on every occasion, prose stripped down to the bare minimum.
I read this book about twice a year. It is very short and can be read in a day. And, heavens!, how hilarious it is!
It is based on a true life cruise that Waugh went on in which he really did start to hear voices.
It is not one of his most well-known so it can be hard to obtain; it's well worth it though!

Mr. Pinfold has become ill from his use of drugs, food and alcohol, and is in general dried up as far as writing goes. In order to "take the sea air" and follow his doctor's orders he embarks upon a cruise. He does not, however, stop the sleeping medications, and is probably seriously clinically depressed as well. the combination becomes the conduit for a series of hallucinations which become a nightmare and a reality for Gilbert Pinfold. Although humerous, the book is crafted in such a way that we see the suffering that losing touch with reality causes, and when Gilbert finally arrives at port and at peace, we are glad we read the book, and glad the author recovered his muse.

Waugh, Evelyn, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957.

A middle-aged novelist, somewhat corpulent and partial to his toddy, almost a mirror of Waugh at the time, books steamer passage to Ceylon for a solo vacation to settle his nerves. What he gets instead is incessant noise, voices, music and criticism directed at himself through the walls and floors of his cabin. How he deals with these disturbances makes for a troubling but sometimes hilarious and often moving novella. Are these noises hallucinations or cleverly designed tricks played over the BBC? Who is directing them? How would the reader react to them in Gilbert's place? His solution is cunning and the novella is a fine piece of writing indeed. Five stars.

As someone who has suffered from psychotic delusions periodically over a good deal of my adult life, it can be said with certainty that I have never read a more realistic account of this type of mental illness than Evelyn Waugh's classic 1957 novel "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold."

In the Note preceeding the text it is explained that author Waugh suffered "a brief bout of hallucination closely resembling what is here described" three years prior to writing the book. It is my view that only someone who has suffered from auditory hallucinations could have possibly led the reader on this excruciatingly painful yet revealing journey through the darker parts of the mind. Waugh knows of what he writes.

Highly recommended

This is about the 7th or 8th book written by Evelyn Waugh that I have read. Some are better than others and this is one of the better ones. In searching for the proper adjective to describe "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold", I settled on "delightful". A writer (this is very autobiographical from what I understand) is suffering hallucinations for a variety of reasons; too much alcohol, too much medication, too many wrong combinations of each, etc. To recover up he sets out on a cruise to Ceylon on a modest-sized ship. His intention was to sober up but he kept putting that off and what we get is an hilarious account, through his eyes, of the various plots and subplots of persons real and imagined. The novel works best because it is told with sincerity through the eyes of the person having these paranoid hallucinations.

Mental illness is somewhat of a taboo these days so some may find the book offensive. If you're such a person then I don't recommend this book. I admit, I found similarities with Mr. Pinfold's experience and those of some clients of mine but I don't hold that against Mr. Waugh. Indeed, Mr. Waugh probably found it therapudical to write this book. I took it with that perspective and chuckled frequently throughout the book.

This is a rather short book and will probably be read from start to finish in the same day for most readers. After all, it is hard to put down primarily because it moves along so smoothly and you never know what will happen next. It wraps itself up very neatly and quickly at the end. Too bad it doesn't work that way for most people in the same boat (sorry).

This novel was apparently written at the suggestion of a psychiatrist who had treated Waugh for hallucinations he had experienced, as a way to "face his demons" and to move beyond them. It, therefore, is the most autobiographical novel he ever wrote. Gilbert Pinfold (Waugh) is a writer who lives a somewhat isolated existence. When he becomes ill ("allergies" his doctor tells him), he books passage aboard a ship (The Caliban) for Ceylon. After the ship sails he begins hearing voices, and the voices often have associations with past Waugh novels (he hears a revival sermon, for example, that seems to mirror a similar scene in VILE BODIES). At one point he hears what appears to be the captain of the ship committing a murder; at another he imagines he's being seduced by a character named Margaret. The voices continue all the way to Ceylon, but rather than recoiling from them or going mad, Pinfold learns to live with them. In that seems to lie his victory, for by the time he gets back to England, the voices have stopped. Although the writing of the book was a sort of exercise in bettering his mental health, Waugh still hoped "this record may amuse" his readers. Not as satirical as many of his novels were, nor as farcical as some others, the book is amusing in its own way.

Evelyn Waugh's last stand-alone novel, published in 1957 nine years before his death, offers Waugh fans a glimpse of the genius satirist mocking himself. For others, it may be hard to retain interest in what amounts to a novel without much of a plot.

Gilbert Pinfold is a well-regarded novelist, from a generation of writers where there was "so much will and so much ability to please". Now being swept away by the Angry Young Men, he putters around his country estate popping various pills and chemicals to help him sleep. He also drinks a little. To clear his head and work on his latest book, he settles on a cruise to Ceylon. Yet as he undertakes his voyage, he hears disembodied voices calling him various rude things. Has poor Gilbert lost his mind?

"You just pretend to be hard and worldly, don't you?" demands one of the accusing voices. "And you can't blame people if they take you at your own estimate."

Waugh starts the book off in high style with Pinfold at his most recognizably Waugh-like and entertaining, avoiding his neighbors and unhappily being interviewed by BBC Radio. Readers of earlier Waugh novels like "A Handful Of Dust" and "Scoop" will recognize his comic take on the sedate rural life.

"There was a phrase in the '30s, 'It's later than you think', which was designed to cause uneasiness," Waugh writes. "It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much was still ahead of him."

Once Pinfold gets on board the ship, the novel quickly becomes a more surreal and less successful farce. Pinfold imagines various atrocities being committed on the S.S. Caliban which he alone can hear, many targeting him. There are amusing highlights, but the hallucinogenic episodes seem to take the character of endless tape loops, like a long chapter where Pinfold is accused of being Jewish and gay by a pair of louts who conveniently vanish into thin air whenever Pinfold tries to confront them.

Aside from occasionally running outside his cabin blackthorn cane in hand, Pinfold's reactions are too subdued or mild for any real comic payoff. Sometimes, as when he hears himself being denounced on a radio broadcast, Pinfold doesn't react at all, which kills the point. Waugh skips the intricate plotting of his past novels to mimic a narcotic dream, not the first or last Englishman to do so, but this comes in the form of stop-and-go fragments rather than a fantasy on par with "Kubla Khan" or "A Day In The Life".

That may reflect the nature of the substance Pinfold/Waugh was abusing. Yet the result is curiously unsatisfying, like Waugh published this a draft too soon.

The novel does wrap things up on a pleasant note, and there is some mystery in the identity of one of the voices which lingers after the book is over. Nothing else does, though. "Pinfold" entertains, especially if you know a bit about Waugh going in, but he played better off himself in other less obvious works.