Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

'D'you know, all that time when I was dotty I had the most awful dreams. I thought we were all driving round and round in a motor race and none of us could stop, and there was an enormous audience composed entirely of gossip writers and gate-crashers and Archie Schwert and people like that, all shouting to us at once to go faster, and car after car kept crashing until I was all alone driving and driving...' Set between the first and second world wars, a sparkling new society has emerged of ordinary folk hungry for gossip and news on the antics of the upper classes, as they mix with the wealthy famous and suitably infamous. There's the glitz and the ...  Read the complete review

Most people will know of Evelyn Waugh from the popular TV and film adaptations of his books including 'Brideshead Revisited', 'Scoop' and 'A Handful of Dust'. Waugh has a reputation for biting satire mostly directed at the upper classes and most of his early works deal with this theme. His second novel 'Vile Bodies' following the hugely successful 'Decline and Fall' is no different. THE STORY The plot of 'Vile Bodies' is really very slight, I suppose you could say it is about the ...  Read the complete review

After writing what is probably his best novel, Decline and Fall, Waugh wrote what is probably his worst, Vile Bodies. It's not so strange: Decline and Fall had been very successful, his publishers and readers wanted more of Waugh, and when they got it they were delighted with it, because it was Waugh as he presented himself and was presented: as the chronicler of the Bright Young Things; rather than as he actually was: a much cleverer and subtler young man who wrote about much cleverer and subtler things. What is strange is that Vile Bodies is still delighting many people and still being mentioned in the same breath as Decline and Fall - sometimes, indeed, ...  Read the complete review