Detail
Title: A Handful of Dust ISBN: 9780316926058Published November 30th 1977 by Back Bay Books (first published 1934) · Paperback 308 pages
Genre: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, European Literature, British Literature, 20th Century, Humor, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modern Classics
Must be read
- The Red Badge of Courage
- The Giving Tree
- Misery
- Dare to Lead
- Kim Reaper
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World
- Who Moved My Cheese? (Who Moved My Cheese? #1)
- The Stranger
- The Enchanter's Heart (The Ellwood Chronicles #4)
- Exodus (The Ravenhood #2)
User Reviews
Jeffrey Keeten
"'I never thought it would last but she seems really keen on it . . . I suppose it's a good plan . . . there wasn't much for her to do at Hetton. Of course she would rather die than admit it, but I believe she got a bit bored there sometimes. I've been thinking it over and that's the conclusion I came to. Brenda must have been bored.'"
Kristin Scott Thomas adds sizzle to the 1988 movie version as Brenda.
Tony and Brenda Last have been married for seven years and although they don’t have a fiery passionate relationship they have settled into a predictable, comfortable one. They live on the Last family country estate named Hetton Abbey, an ugly neo-gothic creation that would need to wait a few decades more before coming back into fashion. Tony is perfectly happy with the house, but Brenda is subtly, or maybe not so subtly, convincing him to make changes. Plans are made to slowly convert the interior to a more modern appearance and also add some much needed bathrooms to the house.
They have one son who is mostly just a source of annoyance to them. He is precocious and starved for attention, and is often shuffled off to the horse trainer or to the housekeeper to keep him from under the feet of his parents.
They are moderately rich, but feel pinched for money as most of it is being funneled back into Hetton Abbey. Entertainment, as most of us know when we hit a financial snag, is the first and easiest to cut back on. This does create childish resentments in Brenda towards Tony and towards the house, even though, she is the one that is insisting on the remodel. After all she doesn’t even like that ugly old house anyway.
Overall, though, despite the snag in their social life things are going rather well
Until…
John Beaver invites himself down to Hetton Abbey for the weekend. He is a social parasite who lives off the family associations. He was reasonably desperate for some one to sponge off or he would have never ventured out to the country to spend time with the Last family.
”Beaver was so seldom wholly welcome anywhere that he was not sensitive to the slight constraint of his reception.”
He is oblivious, completely oblivious to any irritation his hosts might feel at his presence. He is relying on the unshakable, ancestral sense of decorum that people have for guests, even uninvited ones.
The ever so clever Evelyn Waugh.
Beaver is not a dashing figure nor is he all that charming. He is mostly just a young lad more boy than man. He is surprised at Brenda’s interest in him. She has been out of London society for a while and seems to have lost all her bearings for what she should find attractive in a man. Beaver really has nothing to offer except youth.
She ends up leasing a small apartment in London from Beaver’s rather disreputable real estate mogul mother. Brenda begins to instruct Beaver in an attempt to mold him into a more respectful version of a man she should be seen with. This starts to create some friction with young Beaver.
”You are one for making people learn things.”
Beaver goes along as she is paying for most of their expenses as they start appearing in society together.
Brenda tells Tony she is taking economic classes. Tony does the best he can to believe her.
Beaver as far as society is concerned is just a family friend. It is so nice of him to escort her around town. The rest...well...that is all hush hush.
”That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody.”
It has been way too long since I’ve read Evelyn Waugh. This may be one of his bleakest novels, but also the one most rife with wonderful biting sarcasm that exposes the self-absorption of the English upper class and the disregard they have for any retributions for their actions. When tragedy strikes the Last family the understated, cold reactions of both Tony and Brenda are so selfish it reveals their truest nature. I felt sorry for Tony for most of the novel because the decisions that Brenda was making were so destructive and based on such an absurd set of reasoning that it all just seemed so unfair. My feelings for Tony changed and by the end it felt like each got what they deserved. Both are so naive and though raised in this upper crust, seemingly conservative society, they seem to know very little about how to conduct themselves in such a rigid system of socially judgmental families.
A bleak story, filled with a flurry of witty daggers that I’m sure stuck between the ribs of many a reader in 1930s Britain, but at the same time the book is laugh out loud funny. The plot is a series of absurd situations in which the Lasts and their friends ignore the most sensible course and sail into the rocky reef completely oblivious to the fact that they will most likely lose the ship.
Certainly Waugh was pointing a few fingers and wagging his eyebrows at the upper classes. This is a superb balancing act of black humor and social commentary writing that is not only difficult to do well, but also entirely entertaining in the hands of Evelyn Waugh.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Vit Babenco
Evelyn Waugh is a brilliant observer of human peccadilloes and in A Handful of Dust he is at his best… And brimming over with sparkling sarcasm…
I should say it was time she began to be bored. They’ve been married five or six years. Quite well off but everything goes in keeping up the house. I’ve never seen it but I’ve an idea it’s huge and quite hideous.
While endeavouring to escape the boredom of aristocratic living one may find a shitload of misadventures on one’s own romantic head…
How deadly can boredom really be? For some it can become absolutely deadly.
Fergus
Aren't we ALL Last in the end? I can just hear Waugh's grim, faith-rooted, world-weary grunt of agreement!
Tony Last is a happy remnant of the Edwardian gentry, so much like his friends (and so many folks we know) - moneyed but house-poor, measuring out his comforting illusions in coffee spoons - until those illusions are shattered.
Fate knocks on his door.
Loudly.
Illusions! What use are they in the storm?
As for me, as I grow old, I have fewer illusions - and am glad of it.
Because, like Auden's elderly friends at a twilight gathering in the final poem of his great song cycle The Quest - his version of the age-old quest for meaning (you really should read it!) - I have felt my "centre of volition shifted.”
As I age, the illusions are now much less comforting than is Eliot's "condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything."
The condition of the faithful.
And that is precisely what Evelyn Waugh discovered here.
Yes, when you've lost it all - as all of us will - you'll find it all, if you keep your faith.
Just like Tony (and Waugh, who had moved over to the Church just before publishing Tony Last's bittersweet story) - his own decline and fall.
Because if you're Last, you'll be the first -
The first in true, Lasting Peace - among all the Lost!
Glenn Sumi
I’m not generally a fan of satirical novels (as opposed to, say, satirical sketch comedy), but this book was terrific. Seldom have I seen tragedy and comedy so successfully intermingled.
Set between the wars in the chic upper-middle classes in and around London, A Handful Of Dust is full of horrible people doing horrible things to each other, but it adds up to a bitter indictment of human behaviour. And it’s not all jokes. There’s despair lurking beneath the brittle laughs, and sadness at the waste of potential. I believe it was partly inspired by Waugh’s wife of one year leaving him for one of their friends. I suppose it’s better to laugh at pain than cry…
Country gentleman Tony Last seems more attached to his ugly ancestral estate, Hetton Abbey, than he does to his bored and attractive wife, Brenda. So Brenda takes up with the dull and penniless social climber John Beaver, even going so far as to rent out a flat in London, telling Tony that she’s studying economics while she’s carrying on this affair that everyone knows about except her dim husband.
When tragedy strikes – I won’t spoil things by revealing the event and the astonishing reaction to it – Brenda insists on a divorce. This leads to a completely absurd scene in which the cold fish Tony attempts to get himself caught being unfaithful so Brenda can get one.
One section near the end, set in Brazil and completely inappropriate and wrong in its treatment of natives (there are many instances throughout of inappropriate remarks), at first seems absurd, but when bits of dialogue from the previous 200 pages crop up, you get to see how carefully Waugh has crafted the book. (And how memorable his dialogue has been.) There’s a plot point about reading Dickens that results in the darkest comedy, and perhaps a scathing statement about literature and civilization.
Waugh is simply a brilliant writer. I don’t think satire requires characters of much depth. But Waugh gives you enough details so you know everyone in this particular vanity fair. Their conversations are tart and suggestive, with people seldom saying what they’re thinking.
What’s remarkable is that beneath the exaggeration, there’s a brutal examination of the horrible things people are capable of doing – to themselves and each other.
In one of the silliest scenes, two adults play a children's card game where they're reduced to making animal noises. It's played for laughs, but Waugh knew what he was doing. Oink oink, cluck cluck cluck indeed.
Jean-Luke
And the winner of Cruelest Words Uttered by a Literary Character is Brenda Last. The words are 'Oh, thank God,' but saying saying more would give it away. She is tied for Worst Mother in Literature and her fellow nominees are Margaret White, Cathy Ames, Mrs. Lisbon, and Mrs. Wormwood. She would like to thank the Good Mothers in Literature, and lastly her son, without whom this honor would not be possible.
Julie
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 lords and ladies flit from ballroom to bedroom, trading partners and gossip as they scheme for invites to the best parties and positions in the right clubs.
The soullessness of these lives would be near impossible to bear if it weren't for Waugh's rapier language and his inclusion of the reader in the Grand Guignol. His satire is deadly (quite literally, in the context of the story, but I shan't spoil the surprises) and oftentimes laugh-out-loud hilarious. David Sedaris and David Mamet owe heaps of inspiration to Waugh's deadpan comedy and rapid-fire dialogue.
"Well, well, well," said Dan, "what next."
"Do I get a drink?" said Dan's girl.
"Baby, you do, if I have to get it myself. Won't you two join us, or are we de trop?"
They went together into the glittering lounge.
"I'm cold like hell," said Baby.
Dan had taken off his greatcoat and revealed a suit of smooth, purplish plus fours, and a silk shirt of a pattern Tony might have chosen for pyjamas. "We'll soon warm you up," he said
"This place stinks of yids, " said Baby.
"I always think that's the sign of good hotel, don't you?" said Tony.
"Like hell," said Baby.
These people are so awful you can't look away. And Waugh is so brilliant you can't stop reading.
David
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.
Cecily
Brilliant, but its sparkle is ice cold.
It's clever that the naive and saintly Tony is seamlessly recast as the villain of the piece - not just by his wife Brenda, but by most of their friends too.
But Brenda is the evil one, most dramatically demonstrated by a misplaced "Thank God". It sounds innocuous, but in context, it's one of the most chilling lines I've ever read.
Reading Dickens in the jungle for eternity: would that be heaven or hell?
Luís
This work is indeed a unique book in literature. A feather indeed, but at the absurd service, subtly depicted a declining society. It's tasty because nasty, cruel and necessarily funny.
TBV (on hiatus)
A Handful of Dust (1934) is a sharp, incisive and subtle satire of the lifestyle and values of the upper-middle-class. The opening paragraph sets the tone:
“Du Côté de Chez Beaver (I love the chapter title)
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘No one, I am thankful to say,’ said Mrs Beaver, ‘except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court. They were in no danger. The fire never reached the bedrooms, I am afraid.’”
They continue to talk about damage to the property... who cares about the maids???
The novel is very funny, yet tragic and absolutely chilling. Roughly halfway there is a particularly shocking moment which had me gasping. The last part about Brazil is basically a repeat of Waugh’s earlier short story The Man Who Liked Dickens (1933). There are also autobiographical echoes as Evelyn Waugh’s first wife, also named Evelyn, had a lover named John, just as one of the main characters in this novel has a lover named John. No wonder Waugh sharpened his knives/words...
Kevin Ansbro
Evelyn Waugh's writing is delightfully (and spitefully) mischievous. He's as witty as Oscar Wilde and as caustic as drain cleaner.
Something of a pessimist and a social misfit, Waugh loved to send up the chattering classes of which he was a part. This book also has an autobiographical aspect to it and centres on his inside view of upper-class selfishness and the erosion of spiritual values in post-WWI England.
Paul
2.5 stars
I’m not sure what it is about me and Evelyn Waugh; critics have said this is one of the best novels of the twentieth century and I really don’t get it. It is, as ever, a satire on the mores of the English upper class. The title is from The Waste Land:
“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.”
This is satire, comedy and farce mixed with the absurd; again I get the sense that Waugh delights in disliking his characters.
Tony Last lives in a rather uncomfortable and decrepit country mansion with his wife Brenda and his son. It is not one of the great stately homes as the description indicates:
“Between the villages of Hetton and Compton Last lies the extensive park of Hetton Abbey. This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest. The grounds are open to the public daily until sunset and the house may be viewed on application by writing.”
Brenda gets rather bored in the country and as she starts to spend more time in London, she starts an affair with John Beaver, a man of very limited means on the make. The plot is limited and there is a cast of supporting characters who have varying degrees of eccentricity.
This is said to be a turning point in Waugh’s novels; the point at which he begins to get serious. Well, he still manages to drag in race and civilization. Waugh draws on his own experiences on his visit to Guyana. When Tony’s marriage falls apart he sets off on an expedition to look for a lost city in Brazil; travelling from Demerara. This enables Waugh to draw his usual parody of uncivilized peoples of a different colour with the same sort of zest he did in Scoop. It also allows him to play with a Heart of Darkness motif (will I never escape from that book). Waugh often said that A Handful of Dust was really about the bankruptcy of humanism. Kurtz’s horror in this novel is the emptiness of secular humanism, which Waugh wants to replace with Catholicism.
Waugh also nods to Proust and the grail quest and plays with a number of ideas. This is a story of human selfishness, but perhaps Waugh does paint Tony Last with some sympathy; especially as Waugh’s marriage had recently ended. However he condemns Last to spending the rest of his days reading Dickens aloud in a native village to a Kurtz type character. The point here is that Waugh thought that Dickens was one of those responsible for the collapse of social restraint (as Waugh perceived it) in British society.
I’ve seen Waugh’s work described as a “theatre of cruelty” and I see the point of that. I also find Waugh’s attitude to women pretty suspect; look at this conversation between Tony Last and his young son’
““Where’s mummy gone?” “London.” “Why?” “Someone called Lady Cockpurse is giving a party.” “Is she nice?” ‘Mummy thinks so. I don’t.” “Why?” “Because she looks like a monkey.” “I should love to see her. Does she live in a cage? Has she got a tail? Ben saw a woman who looked like a fish, with scales all over instead of skin. It was in a circus in Cairo. Smelt like a fish too, Ben says”.”
Another trope that Waugh uses and drags in here is the “Oriental” woman who is portrayed as exotic, promiscuous, primitive and foolish. Racism and misogyny, class and cruelty and to cap it all, the death of a child used to move the plot on. Typical Waugh.
Jan-Maat
You need a degree of sympathy for the author's intentions to enjoy reading their book, to tune in to their wave length. This was something I have never managed to do with Evelyn Waugh and his books remain for me whipped cream. I can eat them up but I get no nourishment from them.
Perhaps my appetite has been spoiled by the image of Waugh in his old age living a mock-aristocratic life, drinking too much, his wife - also an Evelyn - who had affection only for a discrete herd of pedigree cattle. His fictions seem pale intimations of the life he eventually managed to achieve for himself which makes the idea of viewing them as satires, or comedies or even tragedies as strange. Instead I'm left with the suspicion that they are in part wish fulfilment (view spoiler).
Anyhow this was one of my A-level set texts back in the day. It features the lives of insufficiently wealthy upper class folk in-between the wars. Nowadays thanks to the National Trust and other wholesome organisations nobody with an inherited pile need struggle with repairs, although they may have to endure sans-colottes traipsing through the main entrance hall and then not spending enough in the gift shop before going home to watch fantasy dramas of how noble and good the owners of the manor houses were in the recent past as well as how grateful and demure our ancestors were for being allowed to empty their chamber pots or bring them piping hot water for their morning ablutions. Life in Britain can be little odd, perhaps it is a by-product of the mild inbreeding of island life (view spoiler).
I like the bow to The Waste Land and I am quite impressed at how the sweep of Elliot's powerful vision of city workers crowding over the London bridges and the well peopled pubs is exchanged for minor provincial aristocrats and the dashed impertinence of getting divorced or not. I was thinking how the ending, which is an abrupt narrative turn giving us a real quest for a non-existent prize as a nod to the earlier allusion to the world of King Arthur and his questing knights, wasn't too bad which rather gives away, in case there was any doubt over the matter, my lack of understanding of the characters. On reflection being left alone among natives and subject to an illiterate half-caste is a pretty intolerable fate for a true blue Englishman particularly in the 1930s. Thank goodness he's got the Dickens for company...
Fabian
Oh what fun to get directly to the root of modern British wit. Okay, okay: the Victorian conventions still resonate, but Waugh loves dialogue as much as any screenwriter--it's modernity & old school gorgeously entwined. Indeed, pages upon pages of dialogue--at times the speakers themselves become insanely irrelevant--invites a speedy and satisfying reading of it. The strands of dialogue themselves are in the spotlight... what is being said (the ideas unraveled, the conventions and hypocrisies deliciously deliberate and FUnnY) is what holds this tale of infidelity together. The third act, its deus ex machina-like implausibility, might cause a bit of a stir. Lovers of language, of a tongue that's all but dusty, must read Waugh POSTE HASTE!
Laysee
Published in 1934, A Handful of Dust is a satirical novel that offers a social perspective of life among the upper classes in England in the early twentieth century. The socially privileged thrive on club membership, nightly parties, and the latest gossip. They keep up a charade of manners, a glamorously hollow existence to which the poorer classes aspire. The novel begins on a light witty note but the flippancy slips darkly into sadness that finally wraps the gothic world in a shroud of grief.
Tony Last is a British aristocrat who lives with his wife Brenda and young son in their ancestral home in Hetton Abbey. When we are first introduced to Tony, Jock Grant-Menzies says, “I often think Tony Last one of the happiest man I know. He’s got just enough money, loves the place, one son he’s crazy about, devoted wife, not a worry in the world.” Tony is a traditionalist and loves Hetton Abbey. Having grown up in Hetton Place, all the things in this grand old mansion ‘were a source of constant delight and exultation to Tony; things of tender memory and proud possession.’ In contrast, his wife of seven years detests the house and considers it ‘appallingly ugly’. Hints that all is not well with the Last are evident in Waugh’s description of Hetton Abbey as possessing an ecclesiastical gloom and a fireplace like a tomb of the thirteenth century. This is the first half of this novel. (view spoiler) The second half of this narrative sees Tony trying to distance himself from his wrecked life at Hetton. From here now, the story begins to feel like a journey into the heart of darkness. (view spoiler) Oh, the ending is shocking and supremely sad.
It strikes me that cruel and monstrous behavior is accentuated because it is politely and even comically expressed. That is the horror in this story. Waugh rarely tells us what goes on in the minds of his characters, but he shows us how they conduct themselves, and allows us to draw our own conclusions.
On the trivial side of things, I learned what 'Hard Cheese on Tony' meant idiomatically. I also found out that ‘being tight’ meant becoming inebriated. Evelyn Waugh, I also learned, is a male author!
Our Book Collections
- Hitchcock
- House of Salt and Sorrows
- Naomi: Season One (Naomi #1-6)
- Asperfell (Asperfell Trilogy #1)
- Really Puzzled (The Puzzled Mystery Adventure #2)
- Twin Cities
- You Deserve Each Other
- The Best Man Plan (Boots and Bouquets #1)
- Un conde sin corazón (Minstrel Valley #5)
- Animants Welt: Ein Buch über Staubchronik (Staubchronik-Universum #1.5)