Evelyn Waugh is maybe one of the most dynamic writers that I’ve come across. This is his third book that I’ve read after Brideshead Revisited and Scoop, and I find that every one of these books sit comfortably on their own. Brideshead was generous in its serving of cynical melancholia, Scoop was hands down one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and Vile Bodies… well, it started off with me going heh? And left me at the end feeling huh?
It is clear that it is satire that should not be taken seriously, judging from the names of the characters(Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice, Mrs Ape and her angels, each name purer than the last and sluttier than the next), and how they just run into each other in society. It is the post-war novel a lá Fitzgerald — The Beautiful and the Damned comes to mind, but Waugh treats his characters with an absolute lashing of comedy instead of the poetic cynicism of Fitzgerald. And somehow, it is a cathartic experience to read about the young aristocrats driving their own champagne-fueled train wreck at full speed.
Vile Bodies addresses the same generational damage that is the bright, young things — Waugh almost selected this as the title of the book if not for the overuse of the term in the epoch. The book is really just the exact same substitute as the bright young things, they’re really the same people.
“All that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…”
And yes, the vile bodies at work here are pretty to look at, but not pretty to call as friends. It is the exploration of petty relationships, most of them temporary and self-serving, there are plenty of pretensions and pretentiousness. As we are familiar today, it is mere human nature to pretend to be wealthier than you are, so you can let the good times roll. By this logic, even though it has a more comedic undertone, the subject matter should be taken as seriously as Fitzgerald’s books which have more weight to them.
Even though there’s a generous collection of characters in the novel, we can say the story revolves around Adam Fenwick-Symes (another character with a pompous name), a novelist whose manuscript was confiscated by the customs officer after arriving to England. The manuscript would have been his guarantee to take the hand of his fiancee, Nina Blount. But the shallowness is quickly exposed when Nina tries to skirt Adam, pushing him hard to raise funds for their wedding by other means (even convincing him to take a cross country trip to beg money from her father) and ended up eloping with one of his rivals.
Adam didn’t just meet with hardships all the time, he had some luck here and there — somehow winning a thousand pound bet, losing all that betting on a horse, somehow winning that bet as well, and making a beeline of a wild goose chase trying to recover this money; getting hired as a gossip columnist, losing that job to one of his mates; somehow ending up in the war. It’s best to enjoy the ride instead of expecting the best for Adam, whose substance after all, is material in a satire.
But it is an exhilarating read, if not a curious one. Maybe I have not read too many satirical novels to grasp the tone of the novel, which has the deadpan comedic delivery which does not make you laugh and almost coaxing a snicker out of you. Think Wes Anderson, but not as funny and having a deeper message to say, if you look hard enough. But at this point in time, I’m not enough of an Evelyn Waugh fan to read through essays which try to mine the meanings from each and ever word, so I had to enjoy the novel as it was, consulting the web here and there if there was really something I missed, but not finding much than what’s already in my mind.
