December 2021. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
1930, Chapman and Hill, 140 pages. Written in English, read in English.
On the cover of a later edition of Vile Bodies than the one I’ve read, a blurb appears courtesy of none other than Stephen Fry. He claims (and I paraphrase), that Vile Bodies is the British equivalent of The Great Gatsby. That is a high bar to reach, and that was the standard by which I’ve come to start this novel by Evelyn Waugh.
It was not an equivalent of The Great Gatsby in any sense that I’ve ascertained, considering that The Great Gatsby, for example, has a clear plot, and this novel doesn’t. What it has instead, is a cast of characters who represent several generations of higher class British folk between two world wars, encountering relatively extraordinary situations, and trying to overcome them. In other words, it’s a situation comedy.
But all of this taking down pegs of this novel is quite unfair. It mostly has to do with the blurb I’ve read, which, given the nature of some blurbs, may have been completely taken out of context. Stephen Fry has actually taken the novel and written a screenplay, and then directed a movie, based on the novel (It was called “Bright Young Things”, which is what Waugh planned to name his novel, but decided against). And I trust that the movie does not presume to be an equivalent of either versions of the filmed “The Great Gatsby”. So we’ll start again.
Evelyn Waugh was born with a considerable amount of additional names, but has chosen to stay with these two for his literary career, which included some early entrees into the literary genre of satire, some travel books, and a more heady novel considered a classic, Brideshead Revisited. He wrote Vile Bodies to commemorate in satire the young, upper class, men and women who have found themselves torn away from their previous milieu during a time in which aristocracy, indeed the whole world, has completely changed its face. It begins with the introduction of a few of the characters on board a ship travelling from the United States to Britain, follows their travails in London in their attempts to continue their previous lifestyle in a rapidly changing world, and culminates in a motor race that has dire repercussions for some of the characters, a symbol for another looming great war that is bound to come and disrupt their lives again. For the sake of satire, some of the situations and characters are sharply exaggerated, and Waugh uses these to lambast the rackety state of government after the first world war, the unstable nature of religion of various kinds, the shoddy aspects of business, both legitimate and illegitimate, and aristocracy’s frowning upon any of its members embarking on real careers.
Vile Bodies is an exciting book to read in that, even as the twists and turns that characterize a novel are easily anticipated, the way Waugh chooses to utilize them is often surprising and unexpected, and overall, even if this is not yet the British answer to The Great Gatsby, it finds its own way to shed light on, and criticise, the same notions, the same problems that are going to plague society even beyond the second world war.
The January 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
The February 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Divided Self by R.D. Laing.
