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A Handful of Dust

3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 · rating details · 9,398 ratings · 488 reviews

Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional lunche...more

Paperback, 308 pages

Published November 30th 1977 by Back Bay Books (first published 1934)

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Best Books of the Decade: 1930s

47th out of 309 books — 315 voters

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

Books That Quote or Reference Other Works In The Title

7th out of 218 books — 45 voters

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Apr 13, 2010 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

For those of you who live cloistered in a medieval turret of moral purity and use the interwebs only for researching your medical ailments (and, oh -- of course, researching books as well), you may or may not be interested to know that there is a 'cuckolding' porn genre. The interesting detail about this isn't that there is a particular subset of video pornography dealing with spouses cheating on each other -- because when you consider some of the very specific porn specialty niches (biracial pa...more For those of you who live cloistered in a medieval turret of moral purity and use the interwebs only for researching your medical ailments (and, oh -- of course, researching books as well), you may or may not be interested to know that there is a 'cuckolding' porn genre. The interesting detail about this isn't that there is a particular subset of video pornography dealing with spouses cheating on each other -- because when you consider some of the very specific porn specialty niches (biracial paraplegic dwarves humping dead color-blind Basques, for example), cheating is one of the most banal and obvious. No, the truly interesting thing is that this genre often employs the word 'cuckold' in its titles, as if this were five-cent, everyday, low-rent kinda word. At your leisure, please review some of these actual porn titles: Cum Eating Cuckolds 12, Cuckold Creampie 7, Grip and Cram Johnson's Cuckold MILFs, Non-Humiliation Cuckolding (What's the point then?), Interracial Cuckold Surprise (Is it the interracialism or the cuckolding that's the surprise? Or the permutation of both?), Forced Bi Cuckolding, and The Taming of the Cuckold. You get the idea. Many or most of these types of films involve an individual having some variant of sexual relations with another individual (or individuals) while the first individual's partner, spouse, or significant other watches or is forced to watch. (I hope you all appreciate that I had to go to www.smutnetwork.com at work -- and against my better instincts -- to procure those authentic cuckolding titles for you.)

Again, I find it interesting that the porn industry should employ the word 'cuckold' as opposed to merely 'cheating' or 'cheaters,' especially when one considers that porn video sleeves not infrequently contain misspellings of common words (I saw 'thier' recently -- ahem -- when I was doing my investigative research). There's something very Olde Englishy about the word 'cuckold' even though it has French origins... and the kind of infidelity featured prominently in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is at least nearer to the associations I have with cuckoldry than a giant black man with a Texas-sized schlong anally penetrating a coked-out blonde bag of silicon while a skinny nebbish is tied to a windsor chair. But then again, the English language contains myriad subtleties, connotations, and associations, does it not?

In general, I don't find cuckolding stimulating. I find it sad. Not in the sense of two people in a relationship agreeing to fuck other people with the other's knowledge (which is their own perogative, I suppose), but in the sense of a spouse or partner being kept in the dark, lied to, and possibly publicly humiliated by his/her 'soulmate.' So that's what makes Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust a particularly bitter satirical pill to swallow. The main character Tony Last is a cuckold. Waugh provides us with absolutely no evidence that he is anything but a kind, compassionate, and attentive husband. His wife Brenda rather glibly and carelessly carries on with an undesirable man named John Beaver, who is not particularly kind, interesting, or attractive. In fact, no one in Brenda's circle of friends and acquaintances seems to understand why Brenda should slither around with Beaver behind Tony's back, and -- more to the point -- Brenda herself doesn't seem entirely able to pinpoint his appeal.

In constructing the first half or two-thirds of the novel along these lines, Waugh creates a very prickly, uncomfortable humor. We the readers are encouraged to be amused by Tony's humiliation and Brenda's cavalier, indecipherable infidelity. Even while one laughs, one feels genuinely sorry for Tony. True to his legacy, Waugh manages some very funny, underlyingly bleak comic episodes; one involves Brenda trying to set up her husband with the wife of an Arab so that he won't bother her so much.

Around the midpoint of the novel, Waugh tosses in an exceptionally dark plot point (which I won't reveal here) which, in tune with the rest of the novel, is treated casually. Unsettlingly so. Then somewhere around two-thirds of the way in, the novel takes a strange, new course, which isn't completely successful -- but mostly successful, at any rate. Tony, it would seem, is so affronted by the protocol of the 'good society' of England that he embarks upon a rather radical response to it. But as you might expect, Waugh isn't about to provide him with the respite he desires, and that's what makes Waugh (at his best) so brittle and yet enjoyable. He makes us feel various things at odd with each other. Humor and tragedy. Empathy and mockery. Dissatisfaction and complacency.(less)

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May 23, 2009 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, humor

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, on several end-of-century Top 100 lists,was published on September 3, 1934. Waugh took the title for his novel from a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh returned to the same poem, sending Anthony Blanche out on an Oxford balcony to stutter a few lines from it. Waugh’s biographers have noted a particular connection to Eliot. Early in life, Waugh liked to associate himself with Eliot’s...more

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Nov 21, 2008 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: adults

I have had this book on my shelves since I finished Brideshead Revisited three years ago. I really do enjoy Waugh's writing and his observations of life in Britain of the 20s/30's...He is especially gifted at creating characthers (good, bad and ugly) that you are drawn to and can understand. His characters that are children are especially amusing because they are so "real." I can just hear my kids saying the same things and acting the same way...This book was about the disintegration of a marria...more

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Sep 25, 2010 Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: best-of-2010, british-isles-theme-setting, classic, read-2010

Reading Waugh is like being air-kissed by a socialite who clutches your shoulder in mock affection with one hand while raising an ice-pick behind your back with the other. You know you should be on guard for certain disaster, but charisma sweeps you away in an intoxicating wave of champagne and caviar.

Waugh wrote with scathing irony of the plight of English gentry between the two world wars. Sinking into debt and irrelevancy in the wake of the Depression, these bored and bigoted hyphenated lord...more

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Apr 09, 2010 Christopher rated it 4 of 5 stars

Oh I hate this book--but in a good way. It was one long descent into a world without meaning. A beautifully depressing tale that I struggle to extricate myself from. I feel entwined somehow in the struggle between the sacred life Tony lives of decorum, nobles oblige, and preservation of family heritage and the profane drive to detach from the nonsense of the past. But the characters in this book seem only to exchange it for vapid modern existence. Is there no middle ground?

I've rehearsed over an...more

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Jul 20, 2010 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I encountered Gore Vidal's statement that Evelyn Waugh was "our time's first satirist," I took him to mean our times best satirist. He could have intended nothing other.

Waugh's target in this novel is the English upper class, their attitudes, mores, shallowness, narrow self-centeredness, and on. . .and on. How can we characterize the nature of Waugh's satire? Blistering. Caustic. And utterly delightful.

The British upper class was not his only target, of course. In his other novels he lays i...more

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Jul 24, 2010 Lorenzo rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: british, 2010-readings, aaa-my-library

- Have got out of dinner 16th. Are you still free?
- Delighted. Second thoughts always best. Brenda.

This short interchange via telegrams between Mr Beaver and "her ladyship" Brenda Last may be considered the turning point of this novel, written in 1934.

While reading this passage, it occurred to me that the same thrust and counter-thrust may have happened today, via textings.
Don't you think so?
Sure, a present-day Mrs Last would have texted "2nd thoughts" while a contemporary Beaver -being just...more

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Apr 02, 2008 Dfordoom rated it 4 of 5 stars

As you’d expect from Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust is a very funny novel. But this is very black comedy. Written in 1934, this is a biting and at times quite cruel satire on the aimless, bored, empty and hedonistic and lifestyles of the upper classes and their hangers-on. The Depression has hit so many are feeling the pinch, including Tony Last as he tries desperately to hold on to the crumbling gothic pile that he loves so much. Meanwhile his wife, Lady Brenda, is bored. So bored that she sta...more

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Feb 11, 2008 Robert Beveridge rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished, owned-and-still-own

Now I know where Martin Amis got his writing style from. "Pastoral" would be a kind word to describe this work, as weirdly absorbing as it becomes. The basic premise mirrors that of many comedies of manners from around its time; wife takes apartment in the city and takes a lover, leaving the hapless husband at home. Wife feels guilty. Wife attempts to set husband up with a lover. Husband is oblivious. The repercussions are immense.

I got the feeling that Waugh was trying too hard at the beginning...more

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Sep 11, 2008 Skylar Burris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: humor, classics

It is appropriate that Waugh should allude to "The Waste Land," since A Handful of Dust is itself a satirical expose of the moral waste land that is modern society, a world drifting without the anchor of religion and tradition. But Waugh’s message is communicated both gradually and subtly, and with great wit. He seems always to select the perfect turn of phrase, and he creates extremely amusing and original situations. Take, for instance, the sad case of Tony Last, who, delirious with fever, wan...more

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Jun 17, 2008 Tommy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I guess this is supposed to be a tragedy of sorts, or Gothic as his chapter titles suggest, but Waugh treats everything so lightly that you finish it not feeling overly sorry for the poor man who is wronged, nor do you care much for the other characters and their "satisfactory" endings. It strikes me as a bit too callous, even for the "traditional" British way that affairs were treated at that time.

The only rationale I see for doing this would be as a commentary on the tradional patriarchal soc...more

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Jan 04, 2009 Pris robichaud rated it 5 of 5 stars

As Good As it Gets: Surreal, Amoral, Aristocratic Decadence , 29 Jul 2007

"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du? "
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot 1922

Evelyn Waugh has given us a dark, witty, satirical novel that takes aim at the post World War I upper class society. His writing is biting...more
As Good As it Gets: Surreal, Amoral, Aristocratic Decadence , 29 Jul 2007

"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du? "
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot 1922

Evelyn Waugh has given us a dark, witty, satirical novel that takes aim at the post World War I upper class society. His writing is biting and sharp and sometimes hilarious. Tony Last ( the last of the dwindling English gentry ) is smitten, smitten with his boring life at Hetton, his ancesteral, crumbling home. His fortune has dwindeled and there is not much left for his family. His wife whom he adores, Brenda, is smitten also, but not with Tony. She is bored and has found a lover, John Beaver (yes, Beaver). He is a sponger of life and of Brenda and ultimately , Tony. Brenda has rented a flat in London from John's mother- what goes around, comes around. She is smitten with the social life. Tony is unaware of any of the happenings- he trusts his beloved Brenda and is too busy with his life. Their son, John, is a slightly annoying pawn in this tragic comedy. Waugh has written a disaster of scathing proportions and the family such as it is, falls apart. None of these characters are in the least likeable. Not one could bring some semblance of order and honesty to this aristocratic crowd. There is wit, but with the humor comes a feeling of loss. Tony becomes his own person when he goes on a trip to the Amazon. That portion of the tale is interspersed with Brenda's social life in London. The ending is amazing and Dickensonian,if you get my drift.

"My novel also included a happier ending for an American audience, which doesn't surprise me at all. Go and read it and see if you are a tough Britisher or a wimpy Yank who would prefer some Canderel with their Waugh." Peter Walker

A most riveting novel, entertaining and sharp. One I shall remember for a long time to come.

Most Highly Recommended. prisrob 7-22-07

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Jan 31, 2013 Marjorie Hakala added it · review of another edition

Evelyn Waugh is, of course, one of the masters of wit of an early-twentieth-century sort, a kind of wit that may or may not actually make you laugh but will almost certainly make you sad. Everyone in this book is cynical, naïve, or both, and I am sorry to say that things do not generally end well, although there is apparently a tidy profit to be made in carving up old houses into flats.

I have often heard, somewhat anecdotally, that Waugh resisted the cultural changes of his time, but in Handful...more

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Oct 21, 2012 Melaszka rated it 5 of 5 stars

In my opinion this is hands down the best book Waugh ever wrote and one of my favourite novels by anyone, ever. The characterisation is deeper and the plot more substantial than in Waugh's earlier satires, but it's still got the anarchic, juvenile (in a good way) and (oddly, given that his books always have a strong moral message)deliciously amoral humour of his earlier works and he hasn't yet fallen into the stuffy, po-faced ponderousness of Brideshead Revisited.

I've just reread A Handful of Du...more

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Sep 11, 2012 Robert rated it 3 of 5 stars

Most of us have seen Brideshead Revisited, the TV version. Many of us, including me, may not have read the novel, or any other by Evelyn Waugh. So I picked up A Handful of Dust and found a strangely uneven, strangely appealing, strangely constructed novel where the harsh ethos of brittle upper class Brits featured in Brideshead Revisited reappears in the form of Tony and Brenda Last and their family and friends.

The Lasts are landed gentry, possessors of a manorial residence, that is more fascina...more Most of us have seen Brideshead Revisited, the TV version. Many of us, including me, may not have read the novel, or any other by Evelyn Waugh. So I picked up A Handful of Dust and found a strangely uneven, strangely appealing, strangely constructed novel where the harsh ethos of brittle upper class Brits featured in Brideshead Revisited reappears in the form of Tony and Brenda Last and their family and friends.

The Lasts are landed gentry, possessors of a manorial residence, that is more fascinating to Tony, the heir, than Brenda, who'd like a little more city life, action, and romance. So she takes a flat (really, just a room) and picks up with a doltish fellow, always on the lookout for an invitation to eat and drink at someone else's expense, named John Beaver. Tony doesn't discover Brenda's affair for a long time. In fact, things don't begin to come into focus for him until his and Brenda's son, a little boy also named John, dies in a fox hunting accident. Their reaction is not quite "stiff upper lip," but it's a queerly unemotional recognition of the fact that he was a good chap who didn't deserve an early death, though no one is to blame. Just an accident.

Waugh is a strong writer, keeps up a good pace, enables the reader to visualize settings easily and connect (or disconnect) with his unsympathetic characters easily, too. These characters, who don't do much in life except hobnob, are almost fascinating in their obtuseness, carelessness, and self-involvement.

Typical upper class Brits? I suppose so. There aren't many of them left, but enough hung around during Waugh's lifetime to draw his ire. These are people, to put it plainly, who count...and you don't. They let you know that by not talking to you if they can avoid it and by forgiving each other's sins more quickly than they forget your sins...or if not your sins, then your missteps...or if not missteps, your gauche behavior, including having the bad taste to be born to parents without land, title, or money. Anyway, Waugh has at them, bottles are emptied, beds are filled up, glasses break, boredom always hovers about like a cloud of bats,threatening these nitwits with a dull day here and there.

And then, once Tony really grasps that Brenda wants out of their marriage, and he is to convenience her on this point, he develops a bit of a spine, says no way, and heads off on a trip abroad designed to lead him to a legendary city somewhere in Amazonia in the company of a totally undeveloped character named Dr. Messinger. Suddenly, a British novel of bad manners becomes a British travelogue a la Rider Haggard. Weird? Weird. So weird, in fact, that the novel we receive today has two endings. One is a slapped-on short story that contains this desperate trip into the jungle; the other is, if you like, a toned-down account of Brenda losing John Beaver and taking up with one of Tony's reliable old friends.

I can't say I don't know what to make of this. I do know what to make of it. Waugh was writing about his wife betraying him, ran out of gas, went on a trip himself, imagined adventures that he was lucky he didn't have, and then came back to his "novel" and tossed up his hands, and manuscript, and let things fall as they may...into place or out of place.

Does it matter that he isn't a Graham Greene who kept control of his material to the nth degree? In fact, it does. Another British novelist of Waugh's generation, Henry Green, wrote to Waugh chidingly. That's a hard and unrewarding undertaking, to write chidingly, one writer to another. But Henry Green had to let Evelyn Waugh know you can't let things get out of hand the way he had in A Handful of Dust.

And yet in a wacky way the whole mess is so well-paced, incredibly credible, and stupid that it's fun. Read it; it won't take long; and Waugh in the raw, just him and his pen, makes no effort to pretty up his goofball objects of censure as the TV folks did who gave us Brideshead Revisited in pictures.(less)

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Jul 16, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh (1934) #34

May 26, 2007

I want to say first off that I absolutely blazed through this book; so many of its nuances have eluded me. I also have just finished reading it, so I haven’t had time to process this one yet. Maybe I should wait a little before I do these. Oh well.
Again, my foolish prejudices left me hating this book before I even opened it. I really shouldn’t read any of the jackets and all that. Come on, “A brilliant satirical study of the eccentric betwe...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Smcleish rated it 3 of 5 stars

Originally published on my blog here in May 2000.

While most of Evelyn Waugh's novels - at least the ones I have read - are humorous with a melancholy side, A Handful of Dust is melancholy with some humour. It is expanded from a short story, The Man Who Liked Dickens, set in the jungle on the borders of British Guiana and Brazil, and is an explanation of what has driven Tony Last to that jungle.

The beginning of this is when boredom drives Tony's wife, tired of country living in the austerity of t...more

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Mar 11, 2012 Stephen Platt rated it 4 of 5 stars

In between World Wars, as the old English manor houses in the countryside were rapidly transforming into public museums, and the legacy of the storied professional servant was disappearing, a domestic tragedy unfolds. Enter the last of a wealthy family line, Tony Last, his listless wife Lady Brenda, and their young son who live in Hetton Abbey, a faux gothic monstrosity, that is rapidly decaying and that Mr. Last is extremely attached to sinking every last penny into maintaining. Afternoons are...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Christine marked it as to-read

from mom's travel fiction list

A Handful of Dust
By Waugh, Evelyn

Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.

Publisher Comments

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Evel...more

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Jan 21, 2012 La Stamberga dei Lettori rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: polyfilo

Il rovescio della medaglia, il 'dietro le quinte' di tanti gialli di Agatha Christie è ben rappresentato dalla società che Evelyn Waugh mette in scena in questo desolato paesaggio di nullafacenti aristocratici inglesi old style, inetti e inconcludenti, insulsi e relegati in una serie di clichè tardo vittoriani, del tutto incapaci di fronteggiare i cambiamenti imposti dalla modernità.
Sotto i toni apparentemente neutri e distaccati con cui Waugh racconta la vita del suo protagonista, Tony Last, in...more

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Dec 17, 2011 Agatha rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an extremely biting satire of the upper-class English in the period b/w WWI and WWII. Anthony Last is trying to hold onto his family's glorious past by keeping up their hereditary estate and playing "lord of the manor;" meanwhile, this lifestyle bores his wife, Brenda, to tears, and she escapes to London as often as she can, eventually initiating an affair with a young social climber whom Waugh laughably calls "John Beaver." The reaction amongst their morally corrupt social set is to bar...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Pam rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: before-and-between-the-wars, fiction, adult-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 09, 2011 Moses Kilolo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Reading Waugh’s A handful of dust made me want to read everything he has ever written. I have been searching for Brideshead Revisited for a long time since I saw the movie, and now I have a much intensified reason to try and get my hand on it.

The story of Tony Last and the slow degeneration of his life, A Handful of Dust is a devastating account of how things can go really wrong, and everything can actually be traced to something or some point where we lost the mark. His wife Brenda falls in lov...more

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May 01, 2011 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Handful of Dust is the story of a marriage going sour. Tony and Brenda Last drift apart slowly at first, and then quickly as Brenda takes first a lover and then a flat in London, hardly spending any time at the family estate. Waugh's delightful wit and subtle absurdities keep the reader smiling even as he throws tragedy into the plot and drives Brenda and Tony irreparably apart.

The book takes a bizarre twist at the end, which I won't go into so as to preserve its novelty for future readers, bu...more

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Nov 04, 2010 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Waugh is masterful at what he does here: a fast-paced satire, dealing with adultery, and the British upper crust circa 1930. The comedy is served up dry and black . . . and it's hilarious. I stayed up until 3 in the morning giggling to myself while reading in bed. On top of that, the main theme tackles the decline of the British Empire/decay of morals/etc. head-on and adroitly, without coming off as preachy (something Waugh has been accused of in his later work).

However, plot wise I found the t...more

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Nov 17, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What delicious fun! This book is usually called a satire, by which it seems to be meant that Waugh disliked almost all the characters and usually selected the nasty option for their actions in the story. That is not normally my cup of tea, but he was so extremely good at it. So, a slightly naughty reading pleasure, I suppose -- had me laughing aloud numerous times. An enjoyable response that doesn't happen often anymore! The plot takes an odd turn as the book approaches its end, but that proved...more

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Nov 03, 2009 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature

I don’t know why I thought this was going to be a comedy, but I did think that when I started. The problem might have been the title, the clear allusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems - you can only really be either ponderous or funny if you allude to The Waste Land and I just suspected that this would be funny. And then it starts with a character who is on the outskirts of polite society – not unlike the main character in Waugh’s first novel Decline And Fall, and well, it just made...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Jacobsson rated it 3 of 5 stars

Всегда пробегал в книжных мимо полок с его книгами самым стремительнейшим образом, потому что смущало имя, смутно намекающее о неприятном глазу и мыслям «любовном романе». Я ошибся и не ошибся at the same time.
Семейная чета Ласт коротает время в фамильном особняке Хеттон, который необходимо сохранить, ведь на дворе уже 1930-е и готика никому не нужна и даже больше. К ним на голову сваливается лентяй и прощелыга, но мистер Бивер — бедняк, каким-то образом вхожий, точнее просачивающийся в высший с...more Всегда пробегал в книжных мимо полок с его книгами самым стремительнейшим образом, потому что смущало имя, смутно намекающее о неприятном глазу и мыслям «любовном романе». Я ошибся и не ошибся at the same time.
Семейная чета Ласт коротает время в фамильном особняке Хеттон, который необходимо сохранить, ведь на дворе уже 1930-е и готика никому не нужна и даже больше. К ним на голову сваливается лентяй и прощелыга, но мистер Бивер — бедняк, каким-то образом вхожий, точнее просачивающийся в высший свет.
Пролистав такие вводные я чуть было не отчаялся и не поехал, настолько мне чужды эти псевдоаристократические пересуды, романчики и прочее. И я не говорю, что в дальнейшем что-то кардинально изменилось, разве что под САМЫЙ конец... Нет, положение спасал ритм действия, такая одновременность происходящего, не выпускающая попавшегося на крючок читателя, благодаря этому книга пролетает и оставляет лучшее впечатление, чем если бы я мучил её неделю. И возвращаясь к теме (не)любви. Здесь никто никого не любит. И эта неожиданная жёсткость и жестокость к персонажам, устоям, пересудам, романчикам и прочему, наверное, и отличает Ивлина от прочих мужчин-писателей с женскими именами. Уж насколько выгодно — не знаю.(less)

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Aug 10, 2011 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-lit, humor

I see that I have classified A Handful of Dust as "humor." It is, a sort of bright, brittle, mirthless humor that looks at the sea of human relationships and sees them dissolve in the great wastes that surround and lay beyond a seemingly humdrum life.

Tony and Brenda Last live in the country. Back when Tony was wooing Brenda, they went out to parties and were bright young things who seemed to lead a charmed life. Tony was equally wedded to his family's country estate, Hetton. Brenda becomes so bo...more I see that I have classified A Handful of Dust as "humor." It is, a sort of bright, brittle, mirthless humor that looks at the sea of human relationships and sees them dissolve in the great wastes that surround and lay beyond a seemingly humdrum life.

Tony and Brenda Last live in the country. Back when Tony was wooing Brenda, they went out to parties and were bright young things who seemed to lead a charmed life. Tony was equally wedded to his family's country estate, Hetton. Brenda becomes so bored with her country life that she takes a pied à terre in London from a Mrs. Beaver, whose son John and her have become a hot item. As time passes, Brenda spends less and less time at Hetton, until tragedy strikes when her son John Andrew is killed when kicked in the head by a horse. At that point, Brenda tells Tony she wants a divorce and that she is in love with John Beaver, who is roundly despised by most of London society.

When it transpires that Brenda asks for 2,000 pounds sterling per year, which would force him to sell Hetton, Tony Last decides to refuse the divorce (which at that time was possible) and go off to the jungles of Brazil with a half-crocked explorer and arms peddler named Dr. Messinger. There he contracts some nameless jungle fever and is left in camp while Messinger goes off alone and drowns in some rapids.

What happens next is so beyond belief that I would never think of divulging it. You must read the book, which is truly a delight. Take, for example, this description of the jungles of Brazil and Guyana:

Since they had left Georgetown there had not been any part of his body that was ever wholly at ease. His face and neck were burned by the sun reflected from the water; the skin was flaking off them so that he was unable to shave. The stiff growth of beard pricked him between chin and throat. Every part of his skin was also bitten by cabouri fly. They had found a way into the button-holes of his shirt and the laces of his breeches; mosquitoes had got him at the ankles when he changed into slacks for the evening. He had picked up bêtes rouges in the bush and they were crawling and burrowing under his skin; the bitter oil which Dr. Messinger had given him as protection, had set up a rash of its own wherever he had applied it. Every evening after washing he had burned off a few ticks with a cigarette end but they had left irritable little scars behind them; so had the djiggas [chiggers?] which one of the black boys had dug out from under his toe nails and the horny skin on the balls of his feet. A marabunta had left a painful swelling on his left hand.

Not since H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle have I read anything that would so prejudice me against traveling in equatorial regions.

I had read this book back in college -- some time during the Paleolithic era -- and remember loving it. I still do. Now I will probably re-read a few more of his books and branch out into his unjustly ignored travel works written during the 1930s. (less)

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Feb 18, 2013 Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars

It isn't very often that a novel makes me gasp while I'm reading it, but that's what happened when I saw Brenda Last's reaction to a death in the family. A Handful of Dust is a cruelly observant, clinically precise chronicle of the dissolution of an upper-crust marriage in 1930s England. Toby Last is a toff obsessed with the maintenance of Hetton Abbey, his family's unfashionable estate. Brenda Last, unable to tolerate the isolation and boredom of Toby's life, falls into an affair that sets the...more

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About Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was al...more Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”

In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928.

In 1928 he was married for the first time to Evelyn Gardiner. She proved unfaithful and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism.

During the thirties Waugh produced one gem after another. From this decade come: “Vile Bodies” (1930), “Black Mischief” (1932), the incomparable “A Handful of Dust” (1934) and “Scoop” (1938). After the Second World War he published what is for many his masterpiece, “Brideshead Revisited,” in which his Catholicism took center stage. “The Loved One” a scathing satire of the American death industry followed in 1947. After publishing his “Sword of Honor Trilogy” about his experiences in World War II (“Men at Arms” (1952), “Officers and Gentlemen” (1955), “Unconditional Surrender" (1961) his career was seen to be on the wane. In fact, “Basil Seal Rides Again” (1963) - his last published novel - received little critical or commercial attention.

Evelyn Waugh, considered by many to be the greatest satirical novelist of his day, passed away on 10 April 1966 at the age of 62.

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“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.” — 14 people liked it

“Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.” — 3 people liked it

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