A Handful of Dust

The Gothic Pile and the Predatory World

Hetton Abbey is Tony Last’s ancestral home, a Victorian Gothic confection that is laughed at by everyone who visits it — too large, too expensive to maintain, architecturally unfashionable — and which Tony loves with a devotion that is the novel’s central fact. Each room is named after characters from Arthurian legend. Tony knows the house as some people know a person: its history, its costs, its particular quality of light at different seasons. When his wife Brenda begins an affair with John Beaver, a London social hanger-on of spectacular vapidity, it is Tony’s attachment to Hetton — to stability, to the English countryside, to the particular virtues of the gentleman-landowner — that makes him the ideal victim for the sophisticated predations of the London world.

A Handful of Dust is Waugh’s darkest novel and his most perfectly constructed. The title comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” — and the epigraph signals that beneath the comedy is a meditation on the spiritual emptiness of modern England, on what has been lost when the faith that gave Hetton its name was replaced by the social arrangements that are destroying it. Tony cannot articulate any of this; he is not a man for articulation. He simply loves his house and believes in what it represents, and these beliefs make him helpless.

The plotting of Tony’s destruction is described with the same flat accuracy Waugh brought to the party scenes of Vile Bodies, but the stakes are now recognizably higher. Brenda’s affair with Beaver — who is presented as comprehensively insignificant: charming in no detectable way, interesting on no discernible subject, valuable to his mother’s social arrangements and not otherwise — is both comic and devastating. The scene in which Brenda is told that “John” is dead and assumes it is Beaver rather than her own young son is one of the most shocking moments in English comic fiction: not because Waugh editorialises it, but because he does not.

The Amazon and Mr. Todd

Tony, attempting to escape his destroyed life through travel to Brazil, is intercepted in the jungle by an Englishman named Todd, who feeds him back to health and then reveals that he will never be allowed to leave. Mr. Todd cannot read; he loves Dickens; Tony must read aloud to him, endlessly, from the complete works, cycling through Bleak House and Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit as years pass and no rescue comes. The last chapter of the novel, in which a party searching for Tony finds only Todd and is misdirected, is written in the same brisk, comic prose as everything that preceded it, and the effect is one of complete horror.

The ending works because Waugh has refused throughout to show us Tony’s interiority — we observe him from outside, through dialogue and action, as we observe everyone else. Tony in the jungle is as opaque as Tony at Hetton. This formal choice, which might seem limiting, turns out to be devastating: we are not shown what it means to be condemned to read Dickens forever in a jungle to a mad old man, and the absence of that knowledge creates an imaginative space that the reader fills with whatever they find most terrible.

This is Waugh’s masterpiece. The comedy and the horror are inseparable — each makes the other more extreme — and the formal control that holds them together is the achievement of a novelist who knew exactly what he was doing.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — Waugh’s masterpiece, and one of the great dark comedies of the twentieth century — the ending will stay with you.