Wonderful to be reading Waugh, who still seems relevant and undoubtedly funny, even a hundred years on (almost) from when he was writing. Sure, there is no shortage of casual bigotry, racism and homophobia, but a modern reader needs to view it in the context in which Decline and Fall was written. All authors active in the 1920s were still in the shadow of the war and all the scars it inflicted. The commentary from Waugh is also so deliberately outrageous and evidently satirical that it is hard simply not to laugh out loud. Almost no one is spared Waugh's sceptical ire. As David Bradshaw (Worcester College, Oxford) writes in his introduction, "establishment values and customary forms could not have written a debut novel in which bad form, irregularity, irrationalism, social flux, moral chaos and the undermining of time-honoured conventions and institutions are handled more delightfully." Throughout the work the hero meets teachers who don't teach, servants who don't serve, parents who don't parent, and so on; as well as priests without faith, unjust judges, a physician who kills, mannish women and womanish men, childlike adults and children who are captivated into adult knowingness prematurely. Delighted to re-read, nine and a half out of ten.
By Evelyn Waugh