Book Review: A Handful of Dust

[got_quiet]

Title: A Handful of Dust
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Genre: Satire
Content Warnings: Racism, including slurs and native savage stereotypes.

A Handful of Dust is a social satire originally published in the 1930s by Evelyn Waugh. The plot revolves an affair that Brenda Last has with John Beaver, as Brenda's husband Tony is completely oblivious and all of their society friends look on.

With one massive caveat I enjoyed it a lot. It's a caustic satire and on a superficial level fits neatly into the genre of Everyone Fucking Sucks. The absurdity of the plot and the playful way that Waugh lets the characters represent themselves as reasonable while the reader thinks, nah, you also suck, elevates it from that cliche.

The caveat to this is that apparently Waugh also sucks, and one of the ways that he sucks is that he was racist. I was going about my merry way, enjoying the book, generally fine with some of the "of its time" elements, when for the final act one of the primary characters takes an ill planned trip to South America, at which point attitudes towards locals, native people, and so on start appearing with frequency. The N word is dropped casually, and a local tribe in the rain forest is represented as greedy and superstitious.

Now, for all of the novel leading up to this Waugh had done a lot of work making it clear that what was being said, both by the narrative and by the characters, was not what the reader was meant to believe was true. For that reason, slurs aside, I was willing to read with a lot of good will. And I think the book can in part be read as a send up of the arrogance of white "explorers" as they fuck everything up completely and do not get rescued by the glowing hand of deus ex machina in the end. But even then I don't think that this novel is a remedy to the sort of modern storytelling where the author grabs you by the shoulders, looks you in the eye and says "Racism is Bad."

In order to figure out what Waugh himself may have thought about any of this I looked him up a little. He's a famous enough author that there is criticism and biographies to be found. What I determined was that he was something of a misanthrope and an asshole and his British chauvinism was documented. As insightful as he was about how awfully his peers behaved towards each other and towards outsiders, he also thought other cultures sucked too, just in other, and sometimes stereotyped ways.

Ok, caveat over. Insomuch as a book with such a glaring flaw can be good, it's good. It played heavily on my sense of justice, as everyone in Tony's life betrays him, and he in his ignorance/innocence/complete obliviousness is taken full advantage of to the degree where you want to reach into the book and give him a hug and a slap, in no specific order. The centerpiece of the plot is infidelity. Everyone knows, even Tony's best friend, who in a sense sticks by his side but doesn't go so far as to actually let him in on the plot, and in the end performs the final betrayal of the book (spoilers for a nearly 100 old novel I guess). The cast is wide but not deep. Most everyone can be described in their entirety with a quick sentence. Here is the woman with low brow connections who will find a way to make a profit out of literally anything. Here is guy who everyone groans seeing come by but will make nice to his face. Here is the couple that act like they don't know or care but are indeed in everyone's business. That sort of thing. But then they become a multifaceted portrait of upper class British society as a whole, and come together in a big dysfunctional mess and say the most absurd and shitty things to each other about each other and for the most part treat it all as a matter of course.

Put that way the story doesn't seem all that appealing. But the trick is in the delivery. Every other line compelled me to think, "oh, fuck off" while also stifling my laughter. Put in fandom terms, if you've ever gotten the popcorn out for people who are being incredibly sloppy with no self-awareness ever, if you've ever enjoyed a good wank report and thought, damn, I guess I'm doing ok in the end, that's basically what this is but more fun because no one is actually getting hurt. If you want to get your heart rate up with "omg, you fucking suck" energy this is a good novel for it. I was driven with the desire to know if anyone at all would get their comeuppance, how Jack would find out he was being cheated on, how he would react, and if he'd finally grow a spine.

Meanwhile it's all getting worse and worse, holes are getting dug deeper, and a sense of total disaster builds to a terrible crescendo. It feels like Waugh really pinned down the self-absorption of the upper class (or maybe just people generally) to a T.

Big Ending Spoiler here

And then there's the ending. WTF was that ending? Again, spoilers for a 90+ year old book, but in the end Tony finds himself at the edge of death and disaster multiple times while being led deeper into the wilderness by someone who has no right to be leading anything. I was on the edge of my seat wondering how they’d fare, if the disease would kill him, or the constantly provoked locals, or some thing else entirely, and every time it seemed like things were getting better they’d just get worse, until in the end he stumbles, delirious with fever, into a literal horror scenario and becomes the permanent captive of a fucked up European who tricks a rescue party into thinking Tony is dead so that he will stay forever and read him Dickens. The implication in the end is that he ends up dying there, eventually, but perhaps of old age 30 years into the future, who knows.

I read this book while on a plane, and the last few scenes had me worked up enough that I was dying to get up and pace and couldn’t, which compounded the emotional reaction. I desperately wanted to turn to the person sitting next to me and ask, "Have you read this book, and if so, can we please commiserate about the ending?" But I did not do this and instead stewed in place. I felt like I was simply out of the habit of reading books that do not get tied up in the way that feels obligatory for genre fiction.

I will admit that I have a strong stomach for the bigotry that permeated literature from this time period. It also helps (???) that for the most part, you don't get jump scared with the blunt stuff until the very end of the story. I haven't read any other Waugh to know if this is one of his best as the introduction says, but I would say that it was better than 90% of what I end up reading nowadays.

(This is also crossposted on my blog)

Comments

[vamp_ress]

Ah, damn. This reminds me that I still have to read anything by Waugh... Thanks for the review!