(no subject)
I just read Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. I picked it up partly from watching Bright Young Things, the movie by Stephen Fry which is based upon it, and in part because I recently saw a couple of documentaries dealing with the same setting.
Well, how shall I start? Quite often I wanted to reach back through time and slap Waugh for trying to be funny, because he's not. I came with relatively high expectations, thinking the book would be something like P. G. Wodehouse's work. It's like one of Wodehouse's stories, if you made it five times as long as it needed to be, scrubbed it of any interesting wordplay, and made the plot points like skyscrapers that you could see for miles off. Nevertheless I read it through, because I wanted to see how the story came out. I think this demonstrates that a halfway interesting story can prop up a novel which otherwise isn't well-written, but I'm not sure I would give the story that much.
In general, the book is about idle rich kids in post-Great War Britain. Adam Fenwick-Symes, the protagonist, has a sort of inverse Jeeves arc; throughout the story he tries to acquire enough of a personal fortune to marry Nina Blount, his love interest, and we watch as he repeatedly manages to pull together some money, only to lose it due to various misfortunes. There is a large cast of secondary characters, and the book largely concerns itself with character-defining vignettes, some of which drag on long after making their point. I was left wondering if Waugh wrote this book simply to piss all over the social circle the book depicts. I have to give Stephen Fry credit for concocting a reasonably watchable film from very frustrating source material.
There was an interesting surprise waiting at the conclusion. Near the end of the story, war is declared, and some of the characters (including Adam) are called up to fight. The book was written in 1930, so this is not World War II, but instead a hypothesized future war, involving theoretical events, technologies and results extrapolated from the hideous circumstances of the Great War. Europe is virtually barren and depopulated, and chemical and biological warfare are the default. Britain suffers regular bombardment and is apparently under martial law. Vile Bodies becomes a speculative fiction novel at the very end, which is not something the movie suggests, the real-life Second World War standing in for the book's conclusion. We move abruptly from the glittering life of spoiled rich kids to global apocalypse. So that's something.
I have to assume Waugh's more celebrated works are better; I'm not sure what to think if this book is representative of his writing.
Well, how shall I start? Quite often I wanted to reach back through time and slap Waugh for trying to be funny, because he's not. I came with relatively high expectations, thinking the book would be something like P. G. Wodehouse's work. It's like one of Wodehouse's stories, if you made it five times as long as it needed to be, scrubbed it of any interesting wordplay, and made the plot points like skyscrapers that you could see for miles off. Nevertheless I read it through, because I wanted to see how the story came out. I think this demonstrates that a halfway interesting story can prop up a novel which otherwise isn't well-written, but I'm not sure I would give the story that much.
In general, the book is about idle rich kids in post-Great War Britain. Adam Fenwick-Symes, the protagonist, has a sort of inverse Jeeves arc; throughout the story he tries to acquire enough of a personal fortune to marry Nina Blount, his love interest, and we watch as he repeatedly manages to pull together some money, only to lose it due to various misfortunes. There is a large cast of secondary characters, and the book largely concerns itself with character-defining vignettes, some of which drag on long after making their point. I was left wondering if Waugh wrote this book simply to piss all over the social circle the book depicts. I have to give Stephen Fry credit for concocting a reasonably watchable film from very frustrating source material.
There was an interesting surprise waiting at the conclusion. Near the end of the story, war is declared, and some of the characters (including Adam) are called up to fight. The book was written in 1930, so this is not World War II, but instead a hypothesized future war, involving theoretical events, technologies and results extrapolated from the hideous circumstances of the Great War. Europe is virtually barren and depopulated, and chemical and biological warfare are the default. Britain suffers regular bombardment and is apparently under martial law. Vile Bodies becomes a speculative fiction novel at the very end, which is not something the movie suggests, the real-life Second World War standing in for the book's conclusion. We move abruptly from the glittering life of spoiled rich kids to global apocalypse. So that's something.
I have to assume Waugh's more celebrated works are better; I'm not sure what to think if this book is representative of his writing.