"All over England people were waking up, queasy and
despondent."
Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as
nimbly as Evelyn Waugh, who employed the conventions of the comic
novel to chip away at the already crumbling English class system.
His 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, is a sublime example of
his bleak satirical style: a mordantly funny exposé of aristocratic
decadence and ennui in England between the wars.
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal
past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom
with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays
the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she
sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the
social-climbing idler John Beaver. In the first half of the novel
Waugh fearlessly anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and
shameless. Everyone moves through an endless cycle of parties and
country-house weekends, being scrupulously polite in public and
utterly horrid in private. Sex is something one does to relieve the
boredom, and Brenda's affair provides a welcome subject for
conversation:
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre
romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together,
and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple,
vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the
telephone.
Tony's indifference and Brenda's selfishness give their
relationship a sort of equilibrium until tragedy forces them to
face facts. The collapse of their relationship accelerates, and in
the famous final section of the book Tony seeks solace in a
foolhardy search for El Dorado, throwing himself on the mercy of a
jungle only slightly more savage than the one he leaves behind in
England. For all its biting wit, A Handful of Dust paints a
bleak picture of the English upper classes, reaching beyond satire
toward a very modern sense of despair. In Waugh's world, culture,
breeding, and the trappings of civilization only provide more
subtle means of destruction. --Simon Leake