Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall would have been the perfect airplane book. I can't be 100% sure because the overhead reading lamps weren't working and I had to continue reading after landing. Nonetheless it was a barrel of laughs and made the hours before lights-out go by quickly.

I read that Evelyn Waugh's first 5 novels - Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop - are all written in the same style. Having read and loved 2 out of 5, I can't wait to get my hands on the others. This would also explain why I love his earlier work but didn't really enjoy Brideshead Revisited when I read it as a teenager. Not quite as funneh as the early Waugh.

Anyway, Decline and Fall has the "usual" elements of the comedic farce. Not-very-competent people fall into jobs ill-suited to them, and hilarity ensues. Waugh's writing is terrific. Even as he writes funny stories, the prose is aesthetically beautiful too.

My favourite passage from the book Grimes' monologue after he gets married, regrets it, and fakes his own death.

"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. [...] Our life is lived between two homes. We emerge for a little into the light, then the front door closes. The chintz curtains shut out the sun, and the hearth glows with the fire of home, while upstairs, above our heads, are enacted again the awful accidents of adolescence. There's a home and family waiting for every one of us. We can't escape, try how we may. [...] As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home-builders, beavers and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?"