Decline and Fall
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A partly autobiographical novel, Decline and Fall is based, in part, on Waugh's schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales.It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.
Customer Reviews
Down and out abbey
3.5 stars
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903–1966) was an Oxford-educated English journalist, novelist, biographer, and travel writer, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. (Thank you, Wikipedia). He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he started writing full-time, and had many fashion-conscious, aristocratic friends.
Decline And Fall, his first published novel, is a satire about the world in which he grew up. The title is a tip of the hat to Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, both required reading at Oxford in Waugh’s day.
Moral questions are raised, but as the author explicitly stated in a note to the first edition, his principal intention was to be funny. I still found Decline and Fall funny a hundred years on, albeit less so than I did when I first read it, a time when novels of the Edwardian era (Howard’s End, I’m looking at you) were more widely consumed. I’m not saying it’s a good thing they were, just that I’m old.
Speaking of which, Waugh was only 25 when this was published, so it is hardly surprising his later work shows greater maturity. (I will always love Bridey, no matter what anyone says.)