Literature │A Waste Land
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

(published in ‘Avrupa’ newspaper)

As I searched among the library shelves for a Vita-Sackville West novel, and unable to find one, I set out to find another book, as I can not abide leaving the library empty handed, and that was when I came across Evelyn Waugh. I knew that he had written Brideshead Revisited (1945) which had been turned into a film for a second time in 2008, but that too was not available; however, I was not disheartened, as I came across A Handful of Dust and returned home, anxious to delve into my new find.

Evelyn Waugh, was born in London in 1903, into a comfortable English middle-class family, but he wasn’t really a happy chap as he contemplated suicide, he even got as far as swimming out to drown himself, but had decided that it wasn’t really for him. Waugh has been considered to be one of the greatest English writer’s of his time, but he has also been considered to be unimaginative and untrue about certain aspects of society, his writing bulges with satire, almost in the same league as William Hogarth, but not anywhere as good as Alexander Pope.

A Handful of Dust (1934) was Waugh’s fourth novel, it delves into the marital state of Mr Tony Last and Lady Brenda Last, which turns out to not be such a contented one, and of course Tony is completely oblivious to his wife’s dissatisfaction with her life in her husband’s beloved Hetton Abbey, which is out in the country, in the middle of nowhere. It is not long before you become aware of a satirical voice, in fact the first instance made me laugh out loud when John Beaver refers to his mother as “mumsy.” Waugh sets the classes apart immediately on the page mainly through language, there is the upper class (Tony Last & co), the middle class, aspiring to be the upper class (Mr Beaver and his mother) and there is the working class (Ben) who manages the horses and has a certain effect on the young John Last. These separations are terribly obvious, and therefore, the book doesn’t make one’s cogs in the brain work too hard. At first, I found the writing to be awfully flat, the language dried to the point of it shrivelling, and therefore did not really engage with my mind, it almost seemed somewhat feeble and laughable, but this may have been Waugh’s ruse all along. Waugh places the concept of the gothic in the background, with the gothic Abbey as the Last’s home which has been passed down from one generation to the other, and with the even more terrifying ending of the book, in which we finally find ourselves in the desolate and dangerous land of Brazil.

Until chapter five, titled “In Search of a City”, the novel doesn’t really roll out in front of us very gracefully, instead, it is as if it has been plonked onto our laps, as though Waugh is saying “there, make what you will out of it, I am done with it.” My first impression to Waugh’s writing came with a sense of hostility, as it seemed as though he hadn’t placed a scrap of emotion within the flat text, maybe it was to do with the fact that he didn’t favour marriage too well due to the break up of his first one, but I shall not go into that. I laid it down to what seemed like what could be considered as emotionless-ponce English. His ability to describe a setting is least to say lacking, that is until the end when the setting is reverted to foreign lands such as Brazil, maybe where his heart really lies, but in the meantime, descriptions of what are presumed to be beautiful settings in England where dismissed and replaced with bland imagery without the slightest hint of poetry, which is the way that I tend to enjoy settings as they broaden the imagination. However, I may have been hasty, as the novel is about the decay of marriage and the absurdities of society, the title even induces a strong sense of this decay, as well as the thoughts of “nothingness”, which is a concept that Waugh took away from Eliot’s epic poem, “The Waste Land”. Waugh cleverly uses language to mirror this sense of nihilism, making the reader aware that he is not in fact dosing away in his chair, but sitting upright, ready to write a story, which may not be a completely accurate image of society, as declared by Virginia Woolf, but an image of a society which is quite real to Waugh himself.

Character development is not Waugh’s strong point; his penchant is with actions and situations that arise within the text, making the novel heavily based on circumstances. Waugh’s fixation with the gothic becomes more apparent towards the end as Tony Last tries to escape a divorce settlement and leaves his beloved abbey to pursue a lost city in Brazil in which we become wrapped up in concepts of the ‘other’ and the “sublime & the beautiful”. The last part of the novel could not be further away from the posh confines of life at Hetton. In fact it is exhilarating, and exciting, but I warn you, this novel has a cruel twist, one that leaves the reader shocked, and petrified, it’s almost a cruel joke on the author’s behalf, and it is this twist at the end that makes the read truly worth plunging into.

©Zehra Mustafa