[Cantwell was an American editor and fiction writer. In the following review, he objects to Waugh's light treatment of imperialism in Black Mischief.]

Like Hindoo Holiday, published a few months ago with considerable success, Black Mischief is a study of some of the more droll results of European imperialism. Hindoo Holiday revolved around the activities of an engaging, homo-sexual Indian ruler, and the humor had its source in his misuse of the English language and in his baffled attempts to understand European history and customs. The appeal of Black Mischief is on a somewhat higher level, for Waugh has more respect for factual reality, and his sense of humor is a little grim: there are various picturesque assassinations in the course of the story, and the climax comes when the hero sits in on a cannibal feast and eats his sweetheart. The central figure of Black Mischief is Seth, a Negro educated at Oxford and determined to bring progress to his native state of Azania whether his subjects want it or not. He is aided by an up-to-date soldier of fortune named Basil Seal, who tries to put through a One-Year Plan of modernization and improvement. And instead of pederasty and mispronunciation, which created the funny scenes in Hindoo Holiday, the humor revolves around revolutions, diplomatic intrigues and stupidity, birth control, graft, and the befuddlement of two dreary representatives of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

But the details of these novels are less interesting than the point of view they represent. Both Waugh and Ackerman write in the tradition which is usually associated with Aldous Huxley and Norman Douglas; both, that is to say, are commonly described in conventional literary terminology as cynical and disillusioned. So it is a little odd to find them writing of colonial disturbances with a whimsicality that is a sort of cross between Gilbert-and-Sullivan and burlesqueshow humor, and to find the relationship of the Europeans and the natives presented almost exclusively in terms of the comic situations resulting from it. In both novels there is the sharp collision between what we know of the kind of conflicts described, what common sense and experience and history tell us about them, and what the authors would have us believe. Waugh is no apologist for imperialism in the sense that Kipling was a great apologist for it; he is not politically alert in the way that Kipling was, and he is not so conscious of the needs of the dominant class of his time. On the contrary he dislikes imperialism, but not to the point of attacking it; the satire is all directed at trivial subjects, and humor in this case is only an unsatisfactory refuge.