SOURCE: “A Story with a Moral,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Donat Gallagher, Little, Brown, 1984, pp. 511-13.

In the following favorable review, originally published in June 1956, Waugh asserts that Mackenzie “gently and wisely expounds the deterioration of a human character” in Thin Ice.

For forty-five years, the full reading-life of most of us, there has been an unbroken series of novels by Sir Compton Mackenzie. He has written much else, but it is primarily as a novelist of great versatility, ranging from high romance, through satire to farce, that we honour him. This year he has given us something substantial and new and ambitious; a morality. Everything he writes sets us an example of elegance and sound workmanship. In Thin Ice he points a moral and an apt one. He has taken as his theme one which, despite the strenuous discussion it...