Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh



I loved all the books of Evelyn Waugh that I have read so far and three are included in the Modern Library top 100 books. Decline and Fall is not, even if it witty and very funny, like the other three which had been in my hand up to now.


With decline and Fall I was not lucky enough to find the book, an unabridged version. I listen to a BBC play based on it, with Jim Broadbent and Andrew Sachs. The former is a great actor admired in many films and the latter I knew from Fawlty Towers, where he plays a memorable Manuel:

“I know nothing, I come from Barcelona…Si, que, what, etc”

Paul Penny feather is the main character, who is expelled from Oxford for doing…nothing. Because he has no money, what was left by his father is withheld by a tutor; Pennyfeather has to take a job in a strange school. He falls in love with Margot Beste Chetwynde and from here his happiness goes up and…down. She turns out to be both his ascent and “Decline and Fall”.

There are all kind of twists to the tale: faked suicides, arrests and imprisonment. Characters range from the odd to the very eccentric. We even have some explanations for modern art, architecture: they all need to be machines, machines for living in, machines for pleasure and so on.
 
Paul  is supposed to get married, but has to travel to France on the day before and…I will stop here, to let you enjoy all the surprises, even if the main strength I would say is the humor and not the detective character of the story, which is there and does add spice to a very good work.

I love Evelyn Waugh and I found Brideshead Revisited, Scoop and A Handful of Dust to be fabulous.

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