A Handful of Dust Book

I'm not generally a fan of satirical novels (as opposed to, say, satirical sketch comedy), but this book was terrific. Seldom have I seen tragedy and comedy so successfully intermingled.

Set between the wars in the chic upper-middle classes in and around London, A Handful Of Dust is full of horrible people doing horrible things to each other, but it adds up to a bitter indictment of human behaviour. And it's not all jokes. There's despair lurking beneath the brittle laughs, and sadness at the waste of potential. I believe it was partly inspired by Waugh's wife of one year leaving him for one of their friends. I suppose it's better to laugh at pain than cry…

Country gentleman Tony Last seems more attached to his ugly ancestral estate, Hetton Abbey, than he does to his bored and attractive wife, Brenda. So Brenda takes up with the dull and penniless social climber John Beaver, even going so far as to rent out a flat in London, telling Tony that she's studying economics while she's carrying on this affair that everyone knows about except her dim husband.

When tragedy strikes - I won't spoil things by revealing the event and the astonishing reaction to it - Brenda insists on a divorce. This leads to a completely absurd scene in which the cold fish Tony attempts to get himself caught being unfaithful so Brenda can get one.

One section near the end, set in Brazil and completely inappropriate and wrong in its treatment of natives (there are many instances throughout of inappropriate remarks), at first seems absurd, but when bits of dialogue from the previous 200 pages crop up, you get to see how carefully Waugh has crafted the book. (And how memorable his dialogue has been.) There's a plot point about reading Dickens that results in the darkest comedy, and perhaps a scathing statement about literature and civilization.

Waugh is simply a brilliant writer. I don't think satire requires characters of much depth. But Waugh gives you enough details so you know everyone in this particular vanity fair. Their conversations are tart and suggestive, with people seldom saying what they're thinking.

What's remarkable is that beneath the exaggeration, there's a brutal examination of the horrible things people are capable of doing - to themselves and each other.

In one of the silliest scenes, two adults play a children's card game where they're reduced to making animal noises. It's played for laughs, but Waugh knew what he was doing. Oink oink, cluck cluck cluck indeed.