‘Decline and Fall’ Takes a Satirical Swipe at the Absurdities of the British
‘Decline and Fall’, by Evelyn Waugh, reviewed.
It could persuasively be argued that Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, is also his finest. It is probably his funniest, and possibly his cleverest, even if it has none of the gluttonous prose and lovely nostalgia of Brideshead, nor the pitiless realism (I was — briefly—a newspaper journalist) of Scoop. But there is a lightness of touch to Decline and Fall, an ease. The Italian word, sprezzatura, which describes a kind of deliberate nonchalance or studied effortlessness, might describe Decline and Fall; but it is wholly possible—it is Evelyn Waugh, after all—that the author really did find it as easy to write as it is to read.
The story deals with Paul Pennyfeather, a mild-mannered young man who is unjustly expelled from (the fictitious) Scone’s College, Oxford, for running across the quad without his trousers on. Somehow, he becomes a teacher at a rundown school in Wales, where he encounters all kinds of reprobates, including a teacher who chronically finds himself ‘in the soup’ for molesting young boys (or so it is strongly implied). From here, poor Paul’s life spirals out of control. There is an accidental shooting, some modern slavery, and a glamorous divorcée (played perfectly by Eva Longoria in a TV adaptation). The whole thing, on the face of it, is mad; but it is written in such exquisite prose, and has such a passive character at its centre, that the hilarious insanity of it all is contained. We encounter not just the absurdity of the British system in the 1920s but of the everyday: lunacy dressed up as normality.
If Decline and Fall has a main theme, it is that life is unpredictable to the point of being dizzying. Nothing lasts forever, things can go wrong (and often do), and that social standing and even personal integrity can be reduced to mothing by life’s relentless randomness. Waugh would later reach the conclusion that given that chaos is inherent to reality, there is no need to encourage it by pressing for personal or social change. Like Michael Oakeshott, he would seem to prefer ‘present laughter to utopian bliss’ —or at least in theory, since he was famously bad-tempered, and his readers did (do) all the laughing.
To express something so thoughtful in a frankly ludicrous little story is something of an accomplishment. If this was a technical challenge for Waugh, it doesn’t show. But we have the impression that this is one of those books that flowed from those mysterious depths we call the unconscious through Waugh’s pen to paper without stopping along the way. You can often tell it a book was written by an author in flow. Hanya Yanigahara described writing A Little Life as like ‘surfing’.
I have touched on the technical aspects of Decline and Fall already. But if you read Decline and Fall closely, you cannot fail to notice how tight and well-organised it is. There is barely a single unneeded word. The whole thing races along at a clip without rushing, never pausing to hear us snort with laughter. I do not need to say much about Waugh’s prose style: the critic Clive James thought that ‘Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English … its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.’ There are a few other candidates for that claim, in my view, but Waugh does write beautifully.
Decline and Fall is a sharp, trenchant exploration of the most farcical aspects of British society in the first part of the 20th century, told by someone who was already well on his way to becoming the kind of stubborn reactionary who would defend to the death that very same society. Waugh’s incredibly polished prose cuts through the chaos of the plot to produce a biting satire that still has some relevance today. Not that relevance matters particularly—not, at any rate, when a book is so fun, so funny and so stylish.
