Decline and Fall

The Perfect First Novel

Evelyn Waugh was twenty-four years old when Decline and Fall appeared in 1928, and he had already found his subject, his style, and his voice — a combination of advantages that most novelists spend a decade acquiring. The novel’s first sentence, which describes how Paul Pennyfeather’s trousers are removed by drunken members of the Bollinger Club at Oxford, establishes the register immediately: this is a world in which absurdity is the governing principle, in which the innocent are punished and the guilty thrive, and in which the comedy lies precisely in the total disproportion between cause and effect.

Paul, a divinity student of no particular gifts or opinions, is sent down from Scone College, Oxford, for indecent behaviour that was entirely perpetrated on him rather than by him. The Dean who expels him is brisk: “You were debagged… We have had a complaints from the Proctors. I have spoken to the Chaplain. He agrees with me that in the circumstances we cannot overlook it.” The logic is impeccable and completely insane, and it is the logic that governs everything that follows. Paul did not do anything; Paul is punished. Paul does not want anything much; Paul is propelled from situation to situation by forces entirely outside his control.

The institutions through which Paul passes — the Oxford of the Bollinger Club, the Welsh preparatory school run by the magnificently unreliable Mr Fagan, the Welsh prison (a parody of progressive penal reform), the English country house in which he briefly becomes engaged to the aristocratic Margot Beste-Chetwynde — are all, in Waugh’s rendering, organized around purposes entirely other than their official ones. The school exists for the convenience of Mr Fagan’s fraudulent schemes. The prison runs according to elaborate theoretical principles that have no connection to their stated goals. Oxford functions as a mechanism for the reproduction of privilege. Waugh’s satirical method is to expose the gap between stated function and actual operation without ever stating it directly — he simply shows institutions in operation and trusts the reader to notice.

The Comedy of English Institutions

The novel’s great set piece is Llanabba Castle, the Welsh school where Paul teaches. Its staff includes Captain Grimes, a sexual predator of magnificent cheerfulness who has been “in the soup” so many times and emerged so reliably that he has arrived at a serene confidence in his own indestructibility; Mr Prendergast, a clergyman who lost his faith over the question of why God made the world and has retreated into a school chaplaincy from which he extracts minimal consolation; and Mr Fagan himself, whose School Sports Day — in which drunk spectators, confused athletes, and a sports master who has not told anyone the rules produce a competition of systematic chaos — is one of the funniest scenes in English fiction.

What makes the comedy more than mere farce is Waugh’s total absence of sympathy for his institutions while maintaining something quite close to sympathy for the individuals trapped in them. Grimes is a scoundrel but a cheerful one; Prendergast is hopeless but genuine; Paul himself, buffeted through situations he has no power to control, retains a hapless decency that is never sufficient to protect him but is never entirely extinguished either. Waugh despises the system; he rather likes the people, up to a point.

The novel ends with Paul back at Oxford, his terrible adventure effectively erased, reading divinity as if none of it happened. It is the perfect ending for a satire about English institutions: the system reabsorbs its victims, the incident is forgotten, and everything continues exactly as before.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The funniest debut novel in the English language, and a satire so accurate that English institutions have been trying to live it down ever since.