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Second-Lieutenant Hooper (Brideshead Revisited) and Colonel (eventually) Trimmer, a.k.a. McTavish and other pseudonyms (Sword of Honour) are the most detailed contemptuous portraits of "modern man" in Waugh's writings. It is part of the contempt that Waugh does not deign to give them Christian names- "Gustave" is obviously a temporary "professional" name to help Trimmer attract silly women to his expensive shipboard hair-dressing salon; indeed, we're never even told what Trimmer's real family name is, if he has one. Oi course there are many other deplorable characters in Waugh's fiction- Ginger Littlejohn in Vile Bodies, John Beaver in A Handful of Dust, Boy Mulcaster in Brideshead Revisited, Air Marshal Beech in Sword of Honour, to mention somebut these are, relatively, only slight sketches. In Hooper and Trimmer, we are given more careful, and venomous, insight into what Waugh thinks to be genuine menaces to the future of civilization.
Of the two, Hooper seems the greater menace. To be sure, both are objects of ridicule, chronically accident-prone, or rather the victims of their own laziness, selfishness, and incompetence. But perhaps Trimmer's ludicrously intense romantic crush on Virginia Troy, whom he dimly recognizes as belonging to a higher sphere of beauty and elegance than anything in the world to which he belongs, is something in his favor. And, though shaking in his shoes, he does allow himself to be cajoled and bludgeoned into going along on the abortive commando raid on the French coast, instead of deserting, as he has successfully done from other distasteful military expeditions.
We can sometimes feel a little sorry for Trimmer; we seldom, if ever, can for Hooper. We may begin, as Charles Ryder does, by pitying him as the victim of his sadistic commanding officer's assault on his hair (and of Ryder's continual snubs). But when we find that Hooper's ego is impregnable to any such attempts at deflation, the pity vanishes. More ominous are his "overmastering regard for efficiency" (in spite of being someone "to whom one could not confidently entrust the simplest duty"), with his slogan "They couldn't get away with that in business," and his ruthless verdict on the inhabitants of the nearby insane asylum, "Hitler would put them in a gas chamber. I reckon we can learn a...