This is an audio recorded reading from Chapter 1 of the 1930 novel Vile Bodies. In this scene, passengers are travelling on a ship across the English Channel from France to Dover, England. At the heart of the humorous scene is a sly Jesuit, Father Rothschild, and the entrepreneurial evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape, along with her troupe of young women…
Tag: Evelyn Waugh
This morning the U.S.-based National Catholic Reporter (NCR) published my piece exploring the complicated Catholic faith of four 20th century authors: Greene, O’Connor, Spark and Waugh. These four are iconic twentieth century British and American writers and novelists who I’ve often reviewed on my website. By publishing in NCR, I can share with a broader audience reflections on the faith-based…
The dynamics of daily life, the intricacies of human relationships, and people with prestige or power in our communities can appear to be of unfaltering importance. Yet human existence is fundamentally evanescent and that’s what Evelyn Waugh explores in his 1934 novel A Handful of Dust. We meet a group of English socialites and at the heart of this group…
The 1930 novel Vile Bodies is where we truly experience Evelyn Waugh’s humour, his masterful dialogue and his searing commentary on high society in interwar Britain. Much like The Loved One or Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies reflects on serious and uncomfortable subject matter through satire and by channelling the absurd. At the heart of the novel is Adam Fenwick-Symes,…
With his signature sardonic humour, Evelyn Waugh takes aim at the hypocrisy, corruption, artifice and pettiness that underpins the English class system and public education in the early twentieth century. Set at a boarding school in Wales, Waugh pulls away the curtain of pretense to reveal a set of deeply flawed characters and misfits, who populate a narrative that reads…
British novelist Evelyn Waugh perhaps reveals more about himself through the fictional character of Gilbert Pinfold, a middle-aged novelist who suffers a mental breakdown brought on by the use of sedatives and pain medication, than through any of his other creations. Like Waugh, Mr. Pinfold is a convert to Catholicism who lives at a country estate somewhat withdrawn from society.…
British novelist Evelyn Waugh was what one might call a traditional Catholic and Catholicism is central to his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Waugh was outright despondent following the liturgical transformations of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and felt as though he was losing the church and faith that he embraced after his…
Evelyn Waugh was a master of the English language and of dry, witty writing. He certainly proved as much in his 1948 novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. The novel, based in part on Waugh’s observations during a visit to Hollywood, explores the stuffy pretensions of the British expatriate community in Los Angeles and the cultural divide between Britons and Americans.…