Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

A friend gave me this book for my birthday after he discovered that I had never read Evelyn Waugh. He reasoned that I should begin at the beginning with Waugh’s first and, my friend declared, best novel. I was taken at once. Decline and Fall is an ingenious satirical tale with just the right amount of pure silliness thrown in.

Poor Paul Pennyfeather suffers humiliation after humiliation. He is one of the “static” people, his straight, narrow path disturbed time and again by the “dynamic” people who surround him. When the dynamics act upon him and he is expelled from Scone College for indecent behavior, his only option is teaching. The scholastic life, it seems, is the perfect refuge for those with less than honorable pasts. The reader is then thrust into a rollicking, biting examination of academia and society.

I appreciated Waugh’s mixture of nuanced wit and just plain absurdity, which made reading this book one of the most enjoyable literary experiences I’ve had in a while. My friend knew what he was doing; I’ve become a Waugh convert.