It is too venomous to be just comic light entertainment. It is too grotesque and foolish to be effective satire. The Biography of a Marty. Edmund Campion is a simple, straightforward biography. It should be read, says Mr. Waugh, as a perfectly true story of heroism and holiness.
Campion is an attractive hero.
His heroism and goodness were beyond praise. Although an ordained deacon of the Church of England, he gave up a great career in order to return to the outlawed Catholic faith, to become a Jesuit priest and to return from safety in Europe to certain martyrdom in England. Mr. Waugh has told his story with sympathy and admiration, in smooth and graceful prose. Here are none of the flashes of wit and brilliant turns of phrase which have marked so much of Mr. Waugh s writing. Here is nothing even as neatly put as the remark of the historian Christopher Hollis that Campion was a typical English gentleman.