![]() Like Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet and Martin Amis's Money, The Loved One sprung from an English writer adrift in the machinations of the commercial film industry. Dennis helps Joyboy cover it up by cremating her in the Happier Hunting Ground's furnaces. In the event, she feels let down by both, and commits suicide herself. Aimée is also being courted by Whispering Glades's head embalmer, Mr Joyboy. ![]() Barlow arranges his burial at Whispering Glades, a vast funeral park, where he meets Aimée Thanatogenos (first name: "loved one", surname: "bringer of death"), a mortuary cosmetician, whom he woos by sending her poems culled from an anthology. His mentor, Sir Francis Hinsley, commits suicide after being fired from the same studio. ![]() Story: Dennis Barlow, a poet, throws in his post at Megalopolitan film studios for a job at a pet cemetery, The Happier Hunting Ground. The Loved One was his next work of fiction, published in 1948 after a proposed Hollywood adaptation of Brideshead came to nothing. It was a novel that, with its class nostalgia and anti-modern outlook, seemed out of step with the postwar mood. ![]() ![]() The second world war, however, interrupted his literary output, before he re-established himself with Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945. Author: The brother of the then better-known novelist Alec, Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) shot to fame in the 1930s with a string of acidic social satires - Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Scoop. ![]()
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