Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh
218 p.

Penguin Modern Classics, 1967.
(First published 1928.)

Back cover blurb:

Evelyn Waugh once named the two of his many novels which he liked best. One of them was Decline and Fall - and the other A Handful of Dust, also published in Penguins. In both of them (and in Vile Bodies, too) he depicts the values and foibles of Mayfair in that lush period between the wars. Decline and Fall, the first of these satirical dissections, narrates the paradoxical adventures of an innocent young man caught in the web of London Society. He escapes, in the end, to a saner and happier life, but in the course of his pilgrimage he discovers most of the shams and futilities that disfigure the life of fashion. There is no solemnity in Evelyn Waugh, however, and he leaves the reader to derive for himself any social message that may be contained in this vivacious and compassionate story.

Evelyn Waugh is most known, I guess, because of Brideshead Revisited, which is indeed a marvellous novel. Because of this I never really considered reading any more of his stories, because after all, what could compare? When my mother put this in my hands, however, I picked it up, not only because of the name on the cover, but also because the cover was very alluring (and drawn by Quentin Blake, who is most known for his illustrations of Roal Dahl). I started reading it and… to begin with, it isn’t at all like Brideshead. Yes, it’s as well-written, but the atmosphere is so different that if I didn’t know it was Waugh, I would guess it was someone else. The story is so wacky and unbelievable that I bought every word of it. What made the story funnier still was that none in the story seemed to think anything of it was strange! The poor, unsuspecting main character gets put in prison under the rubric “white slave trade” and he does not seem to be very fazed by it. When he discovers foie gras in the prison food, he is equally unsurprised. And it is brilliant.

Read it. Now.