I was running out of the door to catch a train last week when I realised I didn’t have a book to read. I blindly grabbed at my shelves – my current long term read is too heavy to carry around all day – and on a whim chose a slim and rather dilapidated looking Orange Penguin, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. I haven’t read any Waugh for years, so I thought it was high time I revisited his work. I’m so glad I did; within minutes I was giggling away. Decline and Fall is absurd, hilarious, and utterly brilliant in its astute satire of 1920s high society. The plot is fast paced, totally unpredictable and completely ingenious; I genuinely couldn’t turn the pages quickly enough!
Mild mannered orphan Paul Pennyfeather is in training for the clergy at Oxford when an unfortunate run in with the rowdy young aristocrats of the Bollinger Club gets him expelled for indecent behaviour. Cast off by his guardian, he is forced to find some kind of employment, and as such he heads to Wales where he becomes a highly underqualified schoolmaster in an eccentric boarding school for boys. Run by the slightly deranged Dr Fagan and his two sex starved middle aged daughters, the school is filled with a motley crew of questionable staff and riotous boys who are certainly not there to learn. Paul is kept from madness by the company of his fellow masters, all of whom have come from dubious backgrounds; nervous former vicar Prendy, whose doubts forced him to resign his living; randy former public school boy Grimes, always in ‘the soup’ over something, and shady Philbrick the butler, who has as many versions of his previous life as he does acquaintances.
The enterprise, considering the quality of its students and staff, is only kept going by virtue of having a couple of students out of the ‘top drawer’, and it is for these students’ parents that Dr Fagan strives to put on a display of sporting prowess on random occasions throughout the year. At one of these events, masquerading as a champion athlete, Paul finds himself mesmerised by the beauty of the fabulously rich and still very young Margot Beste-Chetwynde, mother of one his students. The attraction is mutual, and so Margot arranges for Paul to come to her home as a tutor for her son during the summer holidays. The couple quickly become engaged, and through Margot, Paul enters a world of high society glamour that he could never have dreamed of.
However, Margot is not all she seems. In between transforming her Tudor country house, King’s Thursday, into an art deco glass and concrete block, much to the consternation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, she is also up to some shady business in South America. When Margot sends Paul on a business trip a couple of days before their wedding, little does he know that the halcyon days of lunching at the Ritz and eating caviar for dinner will soon be over. Again, through no fault of his own, he is punished for someone else’s misdeeds, but his next adventure will see him meeting up with his old friends from Wales inside the clink, which he is surprised to find is really not as bad as it might seem…
How Evelyn Waugh came up with the ludicrous plot of this novel, I don’t know, but the eccentricities of the characters make it all seem perfectly plausible. There is nothing that Waugh doesn’t find time to lampoon, be it prison reform, public schools or arrogant Scandinavian architects, and his observations on society and the often unintentionally ridiculous ways people choose to live their lives are pin pointed with a cruelly funny precision. Decline and Fall is much more than just a shallow satire, however; its portrayal of how the impressionable, good natured Paul drifts, feather-like, through life, helpless to control his own path due to the actions of his social superiors, sends a deeper message of just how class-bound British society was (and is!), and how difficult it was (and is!) for a man of no background to get on in the world. Even so, Paul’s stint at the feet of Margot Beste-Chetwynde does reveal the ultimate emptiness of the upper class way of life, and it is intriguing that he prefers prison to the gilded cage of King’s Thursday. Waugh’s wit is tempered throughout by this undertone of bitterness, preventing his novels from having the cosiness of other satirical novels of the period. I like this element of his writing; it more accurately reflects the conflicts of the time, and makes for a much more thought provoking reading experience. I highly recommend it, and it’s certainly put me in the mood for more of the same. Perhaps a re-read of Brideshead? It’s been too long since I had the company of Sebastian and Aloysius…
“Oh, why did nobody warn me?” cried Grimes in agony. “I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I’ve risked them, and I don’t mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.”
