A Handful of Dust (1934)
Evelyn Waugh (Everyman's Library, 2002)

225 pp. First reading.
Posted 7 January 2007.


A funny thing happens about halfway through Evelyn Waugh's fourth novel. Or, to be more accurate, funny things stop happening. Until that point, the tale of naivety and casual infidelity in an English leisure class family has been laced with Waugh's brilliantly barbed humour, humour perhaps less obvious than in his earlier novels, but all the more ruthless as a result. The slapstick element, the puckish glee that had played across the surface of his earlier stories is largely submerged here, replaced by a more restrained and realistic story-telling in which the satiric element is grim rather than impish. "All over England," he writes, "people were waking up, queasy and despondent." In an earlier book it would have been played for a laugh, but here it is uncomfortably ambiguous.

He cultivates this uneasy tone with great care through the first portion of the book, and then, in a crucial turning point, lets the bomb drop. I felt as though I had been punched, and found that the early episodes at which I had been uneasily half-chuckling turned sour and sickening. Here Waugh achieves something that had not appeared in his earlier work: genuine tragic feeling. It is not sustained through the rest of the book, and that is just as well, but it does mark a decisive change in atmosphere, and what follows strives for a realism -- both psychological and narrative -- that I don't think we will meet again until his superb Brideshead Revisited.

A Handful of Dust succeeds, I think, because in Tony Last he has finally created a truly sympathetic, three-dimensional character. The traces of the cartoonish or the mythological that had animated his characters in earlier books -- and animated them extremely well, I might add -- are gone in this book. I never had the feeling that Waugh was laughing at him. Tony, though not without his eccentricities, is truly affecting and believable.

From what I've written so far, one might suspect that the book falls into two parts: that coming before the decisive turning point, and that coming after. In fact, it falls into three parts. Curiously, the last act of the book takes Tony out of England altogether, and the story morphs from an account of petty English adulteries to a jungle exploration adventure. This might sound like an awkward transition, and it is. Though the writing remains as beautiful as ever, Tony, who had been so expertly animated in the first part of the book, almost disappears from view. The book's ending makes me wonder whether Waugh himself liked Tony. I had thought he had.

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