Handful of Dust

I just wanted to read this book aloud. The dialogue is hilarious. So charming, so British, so… ouch! Waugh’s dialogue is delivered like a smiling assassin– the set up, charm, seduction, then the killer blow, and no one really knowing where it came from. Then there are the characters - Polly Cockpurse, Mrs Beaver and Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar.

The book begins as a romp through the interbellum and the “bright young things” of that time – house parties, champagne, private clubs, idleness, and gossip. Hmmmm. Plus ca change....

John Beaver lives on the fringes of the upper-classes and is widely known as the person you call when you need a man at the last minute to fill a spot vacated by an invited guest. He rarely misses an opportunity, however it comes. He seems oblivious to the contempt shown him by those he aspires to join – a bit like the Ricky Gervais character in ‘The Office”, but with better vowels.

Lady Brenda ends up having an affair with Beaver. She moves to London and sets up a flat and the couple becomes a regular feature on the London society scene. She leaves her husband, Tony, to the dreariness of English country life and his up-keep of the ancestral home, and hands her son over to the care of the nanny. Silly old Tony becomes the last man in England to find out that Brenda isn’t really studying economics in London. Then the book takes a chilling turn, where Brenda’s callousness is revealed for all its brutality. Then we head off to the deepest jungles of South America where Tony has an encounter which has to be the inspiration for Stephen King’s “Misery”.

But, what makes this book even more fascinating is knowing that Waugh actually based these characters on people he knew. Not unlike Beaver, Waugh felt an outsider to this privileged world of aristocratic families, and criticism of Waugh often centres around him being a snob and sycophant. Here is Waugh the great observer, contemptuous and somewhat hateful of the very world he is desperate to belong to. Perhaps this is what makes for great satire – astute observation alongside a good dose of bitterness. The next time my own bitterness moves me to take a swipe at Gen Y for their self-serving ways, or their preoccupation with celebrity and status, I’ll remember “Handful of Dust” and recall that everything old is new again. Well, that and my own longing to be young, callous, and self-serving again.