As part of summer research for my honors thesis I have been reading David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. Initially I found it a bit dense but I found the essay “Waugh’s Comic Wasteland” particularly interesting. Lodge begins:
The early novels of Evelyn Waugh have probably given more pleasure to more readers than any comparable body of work from the same period of English fiction (1928-1942).
I was already familiar with one of them-Vile Bodies-through its film adaptation “Bright Young Things,” which I definitely recommend. Like the characters it features it’s edgy, decadent, beautiful, and dream-like. Lodge writes
Vile Bodies is my personal favorite among these novels, for its daring mixture of the comic and the serious, and for the brilliance of its technique. There are unforgettable comic set-pieces…But there is also a seemingly effortless evocation and deployment of a large cast of characters on a broad social stage. The novel might be described as a kind of comic prose equivalent to The Waste Land. Like Eliot’s poem, it had painful personal sources…but, like Eliot, Waugh managed to objectify this material and embed it in a panoramic picture of the decadence and confusion of English society in the aftermath of the Great War, which seems to be spinning faster and faster out of control…
This passage could just as easily have been written about the film adaption that I so thoroughly enjoyed. Throughout the rest of the essay Lodge describes the mastery of Waugh’s works and highlights the accessibility of his characters, prompting me to add Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, Vile Bodies, and Scoop to my mental must-read list.
I recommend Lodge’s essay to anyone who has read a Waugh novel or seen the film “Bright Young Things.” Also, I cannot wait to get my hands on Vile Bodies.
