A Handful of Dust

I’ve not really been feeling the reading since The Secret History.  I really struggled with Lovecraft recently and I’m not loving the book that I’m currently on.  Evenlyn Waugh’s different, though, I loved Brideshead Revisited and so was really looking forward to A Handful of Dust, even if it is my final Waugh book on The List.  I didn’t straight up love this book, though.  My feelings towards it are more complex and conflicted.  The start and ending are fantastic.  It just wanders off and away from being brilliant somewhere in the middle.

A Handful of Dust is the tale of a young married couple falling apart after the wife begins an affair (with the wrong sort of man, it must be noted).  Even though it’s heavily inspired by Waugh’s own divorce and reaction to the end of his marriage, it’s nowhere near as bitter as it could have been which is nice.  The story, in a very spoilery nutshell, Lady Brenda Last grows bored of country living, so takes a flat and lover (John Beaver) in London, away from her husband Tony.  The pair drift apart, connected only by their son John.  Once John is out of the way, killed in a riding accident, Brenda giving precisely zero shits about her dead child goes for the jugular and asks for a divorce and Tony leaves to explore South America and heal.  This is where the story kind of veers off track.  There’s a fair amount of uncomfortable racism, and not precisely politically correct depictions of tribes (utterly unintentional, I believe, and caused more by shifts in attitudes than bigotry). 

It’s the ending that I really want to talk about.  It’s fantastically cruel.  The book was actually originally serialised in an American magazine which insisted upon a different, happier, ending.  Usually when Americans fuck about the intended endings to British stories it goes horribly wrong and A Handful of Dust is no exception.  I don’t actually want to say what the ending is, because it doesn’t sound as good when summarised.  Waugh did actually also publish it- with a few changes- as a short story, The Man Who Liked Dickens.  Read it.  It’s brilliant.

I don’t want to bang on about the ending too much.  But it is the best thing about the book, so I will.  As I mentioned, Tony’s exploring South America and generally feeling a bit sorry for himself while being very British.  Unfortunately, it’s still the kind of British that believes we should have an Empire.  He’s at his least likeable; even though he’s been cheated on and has a dead son, it’s hard now to pity him because the way he speaks to the Brazilians is just so cringeworthy- like when elderly relatives are racist, but if they were still young and in power.  Tony’s downfall happens entirely because of these attitudes.  The British are arrogant and so the British suffer.  That alone permits the harshness of The Man Who Liked Dickens.

So there you have it.  The last of the Waugh.  Essentially a good book with a wonderful ending.   Did I mention how good the ending is?  I don’t think I could enough.  It absolutely saves what is otherwise a fairly witty but nondescript satire of 1930s English society.  And it teaches us all that imperialism doesn’t pay.

Next time: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson.  As I mentioned up at the top, it’s not captured me.