The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 29 August 2005
by Evelyn Waugh
Monty Python is so well known for scathing wit and spoofing of the English arisotocracy, that it might be difficult to realize that their 1960's brand of iconoclasm comes from a long line of British wits. (Sure, this is more obvious than I suggest.) Here, in 1928, Evelyn Waugh writes a novel shot through with hilarious satire of the English upper class. We learn that those educated in a public (which is to say private/prep) school would be quite at home in a prison, and that two years at Oxford may be likened to a stay in a mental institution, and that the cream of the upper class might be gleefully engaged in white slavery and prostitution. And here we see all these things across a broad landscape of satire that makes this book, despite one small lapse, a brillaint read, cover to cover.
We meet Paul Pennyfeather, who is sent down from Scone college for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, during a night of collegiate debauchery. The requirements of upperclass appearances demand he lose his small income from his late parents, so he goes to work as a teacher in a perfectly awful little school for boys. He is barely required to teach, and keeping up the appearances becomes the rule of law. All the other teachers are ne'er-do-wells of one sort or another, and their adventures end at end of term. Paul meets the mother of one of the little boys, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who takes him under her wing in an ugly modern country house. On the eve of their marriage, though, he is arrested for her crimes and like a good English gentleman, takes the fall. He isn't completely stupid, but keeping up the appearances is his downfall. The whole culture is here portrayed as the mere support of a vast facade of gentlemanly behavior. Pennyfeather gets out of prison, and returns to a life he has lost. Waugh's story is amoral and relentlessly funny. The humor is biting, and its targets still lurking throughout the world today.
Also by Waugh: [A Handful of Dust] [Brideshead Revisited]