The Fatal Gift

By Alec Waugh

Book Overview

If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. His novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century.

Raymond Peronne has wealth, is bright, is devastatingly attractive to women: his fatal gift. Second son of a baronet, Perronne goes to Oxford (from which he is rusticated), then to New York (in the'20s and '30s) and is in Egypt during the war (moving in circles then, as in this novel, inhabited by such as Evelyn Waugh, Claud Cockburn and Robin Maugham.).

In tense anticipation we watch Peronne, for whom good fortune seems always imminent, fall at every point-until he finds the isle of Dominica and begins a love affair the like of which he has never known.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1448201314
• ISBN13: 9781448201310
• Release Date: December 2012
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader
• Length: 382 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Craft, Originality, Experience--A Fatal Gift?

First, I should tell you I never meant to read this book. I found a copy the public library had discarded at the Swap Shop of our local "transfer station" in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. Trapped in bad weather, with no other book around, I started it. Of course, the writing is expert; Waugh (brother of the far-more-famous Evelyn Waugh) had been a novelist for more than fifty years when he wrote it. With complete naturalness he puts himself, as well as his brother and their real (and often prominent) friends in the book as characters; the narrator's life is, more or less, Alec Waugh's actual life. But the central character, Raymond Peronne, is invented. He is the recipient of the "fatal gift"--but what is that gift? More than physical beauty, Raymond has intelligence, poise, good feelings towards everyone, supreme self-confidence (without any haughtiness). As the second son of a baron, he thinks (and his father thinks) he won't inherit and have to serve in the House of Lords, so, in a certain way, the world is his. Everyone expects great things from this multiply-gifted and likeable man. Waugh's novel traces Raymond's entire adult life--on the premise that they were school friends and remained fast friends into their early seventies. The narrative convention, that Waugh is "needed" at nearly every important juncture of Raymond's life, isn't overworked. Some critical events Waugh doesn't find out about; indeed, the intriguing question of the novel remains until the very end: What keeps Raymond from ever finding a foot-hold in life and living up to his promise?Instead of rising to his expected prominence in England, he seems to fall in love with the British island of Dominique,in the West Indies--and the island is, perhaps, the true love of his life. Even more fascinating, Waugh examines the all-important question: What comprises the value of a life? You won't know the answer to this question till the final pages, but the answer, in my mind, anyway, has the true authority of a man of culture and long, long experience.This novel is written by a master. But more than that, it's written by a man who maintained his creative fire and originality into his seventies and knows more about the world than anyone younger could. If, like me, you read even Anna Karenina thinking, "This is about as deep an explanation about what life adds up to as a man at Tolstoy's stage in life could write," you may be hungry to find those rare superb novels written by people who are older than Tolstoy was when he created Levin, and hence know even more. Waugh doesn't derive his answer, as his brother might, from any theology, but from his pragmatic and varied experience in the ways of the world.What a find this book is! It's full of information about England, Dominique, even Egypt, but, more than that, profoundly wise about what, in the end, life amounts to. The answer to that question I'll leave unanswered, hoping fortunat