Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall
Waugh’s debut novel is a biting social satire of Britain between the wars. Paul Pennyfeather, a mild, respectable Oxford theology student, is expelled after an absurd misunderstanding with a drunken group of undergraduates. Reduced to poverty, he takes a job teaching at a dreadful private school in Wales run by the corrupt Dr. Fagan, whose staff and pupils are equally grotesque. Through the school Paul meets the glamorous, amoral Margot Beste-Chetwynde and becomes engaged to her, only to be unwittingly implicated in her shady business dealings. He is arrested, tried, and imprisoned while everyone else escapes consequences. Eventually a legal technicality frees him, and he quietly resumes his old, anonymous life at Oxford as if nothing had happened. The novel’s farcical plot and caricatured characters lampoon the hypocrisy, snobbery, and aimlessness of Britain’s upper and middle classes, establishing Waugh’s trademark blend of dry wit and moral undercurrent.