Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall is pungent British satire at its best. PlotwiseThe story wanders all over the place: young Paul Pennyforth is expelled from Oxford, gets a job teaching at the worst public school in the UK, gets engaged to a corrupt heiress, and then winds up in prison. The story is simply a means for Waugh to slay every sacred cow available in 1928. The dialogue in this book is incredible; there are dozens of eccentric characters, each of whom is given a chance to declaim in their own peculiar brand of Edwardian humbug. The names of the characters are great, too: Solomon Philbrick, Colonel Simpleforth, Cuttlebuck, Lord Tangent Circumfrence, etc. Mostly, Waugh plays for laughs, until the prison section when a bit of melancholy comes over the proceedings. There's also a serious theme at work: the conventions of British gentlemanliness is so smothering that its strictest adherents are reduced to the status of a feather blowing in the wind. This is satire, but it's satire with a strong literary quality.