The Decline of an Empire & The Fall of Morality

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	• Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh Back Bay Books, 1999 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Deliciously scathing

In this his first novel, Evelyn Waugh lampoons the English education system, sporting events, theological study, the landed gentry, and prison reform, to name just some of the targets of his razor-sharp satirical barbs. Paul Pennyfeather, a third-year divinity student at Scone College, is kicked out after a prank is pulled on him leaving him indecently exposed; he then gets a job as a teacher in a prep school where his past is ignored ("I have been in the scholastic profession long enough," says the school's head Dr. Fagan, "to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal."). From there the craziness only multiplies: a student is accidentally shot in the foot with a starter's gun at a track meet (and dies); Pennyfeather gets involved with the debauched Margot Beste-Chetwynde and goes to prison in her place as a white slave-trader (the truly insane practices of the prison seem right out of a Marx Brothers movie); he is somehow legally declared dead on an operating table in prison where he was to have his already-removed appendix taken out; and then miraculously finds himself back at Scone none the worse for wear.

As I read the book I was reminded often of ALICE IN WONDERLAND: the Caucus race and the track meet, the nonsense poems in both, the "reforms" that are worse than the problems they are addressing, the return to "normalcy" at the end as if nothing of consequence ever happened. Waugh's satire is biting and very, very funny, but never excessively cruel or mean. One begins laughing while reading this novel right on the first page (the party scene is hilarious in its destructive foolishness, "a lovely evening") and continues to do so with few interruptions to the end. It's scathing, brilliant comedy - something Waugh was a master at.

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The Decline of an Empire & The Fall of Morality

When the First World War ended in 1918, Evelyn Waugh was fifteen years old. Over the next decade, he saw a continuation of the wrenching that England had suffered first on a material level, then on a moral and social one. In DECLINE AND FALL, Waugh expresses his dismay that the psychic underpinning that had bolstered England for the fighting proved incapable to lead it in the years that led to the Great Depression. Everywhere Waugh looked, he saw a gradual disintegration of the English social fabric, and for him, this fraying of that fabric allowed him to use his new found sense of biting satire that could lash out in all directions.

DECLINE AND FALL (1926) was Waugh's first novel. His protagonist Paul Pennyfeather is the contemporary English Everyman, a basically decent sort of chap who seeks to do the right thing, but finds out that all too often that he is the only one interested in doing that. Pennyfeather's approach to life is a passive one. When dire events happen, he tries harder to deflect their severity than to eradicate them altogether. The opening chapter sets the tone for his inability to confront dire evil with purposeful resolve. He is a student at Scone University who is subject to a mean trick by a group of consciousless upperclass cads, the result of which is that he is expelled for moral turpitude. Rather than fight to stay in school he meekly accepts his fate. From this point on, the novel descends into a series of events whose reverberations and ripples drag him ever more deeply into the muck and slime of existential disarray. He finds a job teaching vicious urchins at a tenth rate school, where he predictably encounters both students and teachers whose only purpose is to bedevil him. Eventually, he meets a woman who promises to be the Great Love of his life. She unwittingly involves him a white slavery deal that results in his imprisonment. By the time the novel ends, Pennyfeather has gone in a big circle. He returns to Scone University in a disguise (he needs one since he escaped from prison), but this disguise is external only. Inwardly, he is the same passive but good hearted naive youth that he was in the beginning.

DECLINE AND FALL proved to be the first in a series of novels that allowed Waugh to explore the bitter angst that bubbled beneath the surface in an English middle class society that increasingly came to see itself as having lost its moral compass in an age that prized breaking the rules over following them. As with all good writers, Waugh depicts a society that draws the reader inwardly, all the while urging that reader to judge the worth of that society as viewed through the bitterly satiric lens of a man who wants his reading public to feel the same sense of outrage that he does. In DECLINE AND FALL, Waugh succeeds admirably.

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Glimpses of the future master

This is the novel that made a young Evelyn Waugh's reputation in 1928. "Decline and Fall" is dripping with early glimpses of the comic satire that Waugh would come to produce. The story follows the improbable events of Paul Pennyfeather's life after he is sent down from Scone College, Oxford.

Pennyfeather, a meek and polite divinity student, runs afoul of a group of drunken students after a raucous old boy dinner of the Bollinger Club. After a misunderstanding about a school tie, the students take Pennyfeather's pants there on the school quad. Pennyfeather is expelled for indecency.

What makes the hapless Pennyfeather so, for lack of a better word, huggable, is that events happen to him, not the other way around. He meets a bizarre cast of repeating characters, in this funny if somewhat moody book. If you read "Decline and Fall" as the satire that it is, even the casualness with which a grizzly murder is handled is funny.

"Decline and Fall" is well worth reading, but it isn't Waugh's best work. His rather scattershot lampooning of every aspect of upper-middle class British life will be honed to perfection in later works like "Scoop."

It's a great read and a zany adventure for Paul Pennyfeather, and while it appears that the story ends where it starts, it doesn't. That is the key the satisfying conclusion that Waugh gives his tale that at times seems little more than a Monty Python skit. Penny feather is a changed man, even if England is the same. Evelyn Waugh was a great novelist, even in 1928.

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"Monty Python" for People Who Think

Waugh's notorious first novel, "Decline and Fall" brutally satirizes British society of the 1920s with his characteristic black humor. Based in part, upon his own experiences at Oxford and teaching at a private school in Wales in 1925, it lays waste British notions of honor, educational excellence, sportsmanship, the Church, and the upper class generally. In an age when most "humor" is visual slapstick, it is refreshing to read a writer who could be screamingly funny using words alone.

Readers with Politically Correct views, will probably be offended by this book (or any of Waugh's other novels for that matter), but those who believe that the only test of humor is whether or not it is funny will find it an enjoyable read.

Note: The movie version of another great satire by Waugh, "The Loved One," has only recently been released on DVD. With a screenplay by Terry Southern (who also wrote the screenplay for "Dr. Strangelove"), it is definitely worth buying, although you will enjoy it more if you read the book first. It is one of those rare films that does the book justice.

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The sad story of Paul Pennyfeather

This bitter farce tells the story of one Paul Pennyfeather, a young man who is expelled from an Oxford-like university due to a misunderstanding. Ever since this first scene the reader understands that he's reading a novel of the absurd. The point is never to tell a credible story with a tight plot, but to develop a savage satire on the British society, especially the educational system. After being expelled, Paul finds himself with no money and so is forced to get a job at a school of the worst level. His colleagues are pathetic and their small misadventures are hilarious. Of course, Waugh's humor is very British: caustic, understated, and at the same time some passages, like the athletic event, are excessive to the point of ridicule. At some point, Paul makes the acquaintance of the mother of one of his pupils, a rich and beautiful widow who proposes to him in marriage. This seems to be Paul's lucky break of a lifetime, and he eagerly accepts. But the woman runs a strange business which will produce the decline and fall of the title.

What develops as a hilarious farce ends up being a sad story. Waugh aims his mockery at every person and system included in the novel. Education, prostitution, jail, politics and business are all the target of this first novel which promises much about the future work of Waugh. Recommended.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh's immensely successful first novel, and it displays not only all of its author's customary satiric genius and flair for unearthing the ridiculous in human nature, but also a youthful willingness to train those weapons on any and every thing in his path. In this fractured picaresque comedy of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather stumbling from one disaster to another, Waugh manages the delicious task of skewering every aspect of the society in which he lived.

With an Introduction by Frank Kermode

Sir Frank Kermode, formerly Lord Northcliffe Professor at London University, is now Professor at Cambridge and Columbia Universities. His books include The Uses of and Continuities.

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