A Handful of Dust
I don’t normally do book reviews. I don’t normally do reviews.
When everyone was jostling for publication in the student union magazine in my uni days, everyone just wanted to write reviews so they could hopefully snag free CDs and shit. I thought that was a bit transparent so never really bothered even trying to master the discipline.
But I just finished A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh and, considering the lack of anything much else happening at the moment, I thought I’d write about it. But this still isn’t a review. It’s just my observations about the book.
I like Waugh’s work. There’s a real sense of… not just humour, but playfulness in some of his works (off the top of my head, Scoop and The Loved One). I’ve only read his earlier fictional works but there’s a sense of play in the way he weaves recurring characters into his novels, so the reader familiar with his work, recognising these characters, can take a lot of the social background of the works for granted.
While this wasn’t as prevalent in AHOD (I think Lady Metroland only had one brief appearance, or it may have been merely a mention), it was still the slightly shallow, between-the-wars society he was poking fun at. But he never makes his characters airy or without substance. I hate to draw Seinfeld as a modern comparison, but there was a way he focused on some of the minutae of day-to-day goings on that made for a lot of the humour. It helps him satirise his characters but also ground them in some kind of reality.
One thing that interested me, early on in the book, was the use of the word ‘bitch’. He uses it twice in the early pages in a manner that means ‘to spoil’ in both senses of the word: namely, to ruin; and to fuss over. In one instance, Tony says to Brenda (from memory) “you’re being absolutely heroic with Beaver,” to which she replies “I think I’m rather bitching him,” meaning that she’s doting on him a bit too much and spoiling him. In the second instance, it escapes me who’s talking to whom (and I’m sitting too comfortably to go to the bookshelf and look it up) but someone says something along the lines of “we should call it a night,” to which the reply is “I’m afriad I bitched it for you,” meaning that he/she has ruined the evening for the other.
I looked it up on the online etymology dictionary and apparently that meaning was in use from the 1830s but seems to have disappeared. Interesting.
The thing I like about Waugh is that he doesn’t ever give you what would be considered a happy ending. Far from it. While he gives you humour and social satire, he does make his characters likable, so for all their shortcomings you’re still on their side but then things happen to them that can make you despair.
For Brenda and Tony, the death of their son and the breakdown of their marriage—the first was a surprise but the second wasn’t, given the first—would have been enough. But, in a similar fashion to Decline and Fall, we see pure tragedy unfold, with Brenda no happier (perhaps until the final pages) and Tony lost, isolated and pretty much done for.
Yet, along the way… Tony’s trip to the seaside with Milly was just pure farce. And the description of his hallucinations during his fevered delerium was comic genius: as you read the words you can sense the fun Waugh must have had writing them. Tony’s missed encounter with the Englishmen was foreseeable and a tad cruel, but the device serves to seal his fate: reading Dickens aloud to a slightly loopy mini-despot, literally in the middle of nowhere (his location being on the disputed, unmapped border between two countries).
I should probably give it some kind of star rating now.
But there it is, my not-review of A Handful of Dust.
