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Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a series of bizarre adventures that start in a minor public school and end in one of HM prisons. In this, his first and funniest novel, Evelyn Waugh immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingenu abroad in the razzmatazz of Twenties high society.
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 "The shadow which took his name" ( fionnchu )
On p. 163, the 25-year-old Waugh intrudes in the voice of his omniscient narrator, revealing his protagonist Paul Pennyfeather as a hollow man of the Jazz Age: "readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast." By whom? The class system? Fate? His deceased parents or uncaring guardian? Oxford's "Scone" college's bullies who frame him and the masters who expel him for "indecent behavior"? The distanced stance taken by the author towards his creation in his début novel already reveals a more complicated tale than the side-splitter full of deadpan one-liners that casual readers of this novel may have assumed.
The satire begins lightly, but as Paul's unfair expulsion shows, there's a serrated edge to this fictional undercutting of post-WWI English society. Having to fend for himself, as did Waugh, teaching in a Welsh college of less than distinguished lineage, Paul's told by the headmaster: "I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal." (15) At a dinner party for his future fianceé and nemesis, Lady Beste-Chetwynde, the Vicar notes how "lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity." (91)
Neither Church nor the gentry can provide direction, let alone education or the prisons, war profiteers or white slavers, as Paul becomes enmeshed in plans he, as the opening passage I cited demonstrates, can never outwit. The central sections of the narration may, however, be the weakest. While amusing, their pace slackens and incidents follow one another without apparent reason here and there. This may well be intended to show Paul's lack of willpower in a frenzied decade, but the novel takes on, from our distance of eight decades, too remote a tone.
It's hard to care much for any satire when the figures are all figureheads. Waugh's aware, young as he was when publishing this. The novel gains gravitas as it follows Paul's further decline and fall. A tremendous passage halfway through articulates the traditional fear behind the modern era's mask of confidence.
Grimes laments: "Our life is lived between two homes. We emerge for a little into the light, and 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 a family waiting for every one of us. We can't escape, try how we may." (133) "As individuals we simply do not exist," he continues. We seem like "potential home builders, beavers and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?" (134)
This reveals far more "The Waste Land"'s despair than a lighthearted send-up of Oxford, boarding school, snobs, or the smart set. Themes that "A Handful of Dust" would deepen in later years, as Alexander Waugh notes in his chronicle of his clan, "Fathers and Sons" (also reviewed by me here), make Waugh deserving of our respect for the care with which even the less-weighty works of his early years are assembled, and how they tackle, glancingly yet bruisingly, the terrors underneath the romps. His Majesty's Prison no worse than a British public school, war mongerers awaiting their investments to be paid off in the next global scrap, the uselessness of journalistic churning of the "news" to the jaded, the haplessness of religious institutions or conventional schooling: these all appear here, as Paul's long shadows.
As the prison warden Sir Wilfrid Lucas-Dockery opines about Paul: "You could see with that unfortunate man what a difference it made to him to think that, far from being a mere nameless slave, he has now become part of a great revolution in statistics." (227) The vocal register here's exact. So is that which to us turns more disturbing, with the Lady's black lover "Chokey." Waugh does play this character close to the vest, but he does show that condescension gives as well as takes-- see the "rood screen" exchange-- in a manner that may prove more subtle and durable despite Waugh also displaying his own racial prejudices. It's a complicated scene, to say the least, with more than may meet the reader too quick to cast calumny then or now. "Chokey" stays elusive to survive.
Authors from around 1930 with more solemn approaches may lodge on college reading lists, but Waugh, in his blend of effortlessly recorded dialogue and accurately rendered blather of all classes, may have brought this combination off with humane compassion, outrage, wickedness, and insight-- better than some of his more ambitious peers. As Alexander Waugh reminds us, Evelyn labored to capture how people talked as well as how they acted, and sentences here beg to be recited as testament to his skill at reminding us that we still wallow in patronizing attitudes, class stereotypes, and cruel behavior. Calling attention to this as Waugh does, he knows he is no less to blame, but at least he has the upper hand, for he expects us to recognize the foibles here and to behave better than those at whose follies we cringe as often as we chortle. That's the mark of satire that has no expiration date.
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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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The sad story of Paul Pennyfeather ( gmaynez )
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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 "Monty Python" for People Who Think ( diegobanducci )
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 Decline of an Empire & The Fall of Morality ( martinasiner )
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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