In his satiric fantasies of Bright Young Things in 1920s Mayfair, books like Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh captured a hedonistic world of parties and pleasure-seeking with cruel and exaggerated comedy. In his later career, metropolitan decadence no longer held quite the fascination it had had for him when he was younger and novels like Brideshead Revisited and the volumes which make up the Sword of Honour trilogy, while still very funny, are self-consciously serious attempts to chart the decline of an aristocratic, and specifically Catholic, way of life that he believed finer and more humane than the society which overwhelmed it. In A Handful of Dust, Waugh wrote a novel that is poised between farce and tragedy, full of the cruel social satire that characterizes his first fiction and yet marked by an awareness of the real pains that his characters endure. Tony Last is the impoverished owner of a country house forced to endure both the death of his son in a hunting accident and the adultery of his wife, Brenda, who conducts an affair with a parasitic man-about-town named John Beaver. At first, Last agrees to divorce his wife but, learning that this might put his house and estate at jeopardy, he changes his mind and refuses to cooperate. Instead he heads off on a wild trip to the Amazonian jungle in an attempt to forget his troubles where, as back home the affair between Brenda and Beaver peters out, he is doomed to one of the more bizarre fates to befall any character in English fiction. Waugh's caricatures of the social butterflies and idle adulterers of upper-class London life are as sharp and comic as ever but A Handful of Dust indicates a deepening of his bitter, and ultimately pessimistic, views of the changes in English society.

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