 The novels loosely parallel Waugh's wartime experiences.The protagonist is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic English Roman Catholic family.Guy has spent his thirties at the family villa in Italy shunning the world after the failure of his marriage and has decided to return to England at the very beginning of the Second World War, in the belief that the creeping evils of modernity, gradually apparent in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, have become all too clearly displayed as a real and embodied enemy.