928 Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh (read 7 Nov 1967) I have no record of my thoughts upon finishing this novel, but since I have read nearly everything Waugh has written one can be sure that I read it with interest. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on the book: Decline and Fall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ( )

I haven't read this for years but all I remember about reading it is that I laughed out loud when I read it on a train, I literally could not stop laughing. Brilliant writer and very funny book. ( )

amazon PD: Sent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul.

Hilarious. It was a pleasure to return to D & F after reading Brideshead earlier in the year. Much funnier, though less moving than B., it is a favourite of mine, because of the satire & a vague feeling of sentimentality when thinking of school days. ( )

Mild to quite amusing light satire on the mores and manners of the English upper classes during the 1920's and the naivety of the aspiring bourgeoisie (not leaving the lower orders unscathed with some patronising en passant caricatures, nevertheless tinged with a modicum of affection).

The narrative is a 'stiff upper lip' farce: a young Oxford undergraduate finds himself the unwitting victim, several times over, of the amoral cavorting of upper class types, leading to his sending down from College, his sudden and convenient romance and betrothal to a high society socialite and (unknown to him) 'white slave trafficker' who leaves him in the lurch when, once more unwittingly. he is apprehended parti pris and has to carry the can in gaol; his subsequent retrieval from prison by the machinations of the same woman, only then to slope off to an obscure religious vocation is a little anticlimactic.
There are many targets for EW's dry satire and some of the set pieces bite strongest, including the account of a somewhat dadaist school sports day, during which a young boarder is shot (and his eventual demise chronicled in a several brutally indifferent epistolary asides, made by both headmaster and his mother) and in the caricature of the iconoclastic destruction of the Pastmaster stately home for a vulgar modernist carbuncular make-over.

Some of these sketches also sail close to the wind in portraying the casual racism and discrimination of the age ('Chalky', Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's 'companion', is described using language no longer deemed acceptable) while committing much of the same in the narrator's racist portrayal of the morally stunted Welsh wind-bags of the 'Llanabba' local choir.

Other more obscure attacks (from our contemporary perspective) include diatribes against religious movements within Anglicism of the time (1928) and fads for liberal penal reform. Nevertheless, despite its weaknesses, this is the promising first novel of a 24/25 year old who went on to write such classics as 'Scoop' and 'Brideshead Revisited'. ( )