Decline and Fall was Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel. It has some connection with his second novel, Vile Bodies, which is not strictly a sequel. It nevertheless reprised characters from Decline and Fall in minor roles, while its protagonists are in some ways alike, as is its satirical intent. In Vile Bodies Lady Margot Metroland hosts a party attended by the Bright Young Things, the rich celebrity set who grew up between the wars and whose partying antics were widely reported in the press of the time. Lady Metroland is Margot Beste-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall. She only becomes Lady Metroland towards the end of the novel when she marries. Lord and Lady Circumference also appear in both books. But by the time Waugh is writing Vile Bodies his satire is surer, more attuned. His interest in the Bright Young Things and his second novel’s ending show Waugh’s thinking had become more broadly developed and his anticipation of a second war in Europe more pronounced.

The scope of Decline and Fall feels more limited, though much of the novel is extremely funny. And I cannot emphasise this enough: it is extremely clever. The male protagonists of the two novels are somewhat hapless men whose fortunes are twisted by circumstances beyond their control. In Vile Bodies Adam Fenwick-Symes has the manuscript of his autobiography confiscated by an over-zealous customs official as he returns to England, leaving him to repay his publisher’s advance and accept an exploitative writing deal. He is ultimately at the whim of a fickle fiancée who now refuses to marry him.

But before Adam suffers this fate, Paul Pennyfeather has previously had his life turned upside down in Decline and Fall. As the novel opens he is reading theology at Oxford and has rooms in Scone College. One night the drunken antics of the Bollinger Club result in Paul being forcibly stripped and left with no option but to run through the quadrangle naked to get back to his rooms. It’s “indecency” says Mr Snigs, the Junior Dean, and Mr Postlewaite, the Domestic Bursar, who had turned their own lights off out of fear of what the Bollinger members might do to them if they were to draw attention to themselves. Now, Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford. But the most bizarre thing is that he merely accepts the verdict without question, as well as the accompanying moral judgement: “you may congratulate yourself that you discovered your unfitness for the priesthood before it was too late,” he is told. Pennyfeather’s servile acceptance feels unnatural, but we understand that it is made with deference to class and privilege. Further to this, under the terms of his father’s will, Pennyfeather’s allowance is stopped while his guardian begins to enrich himself. As a result, Paul has little option left except to accept a teaching position at Augustus Fagan’s boarding school at Llanabba Castle.

Waugh claims to have based this first novel on his own experiences as a student, as well as his experiences as a teacher in Wales. The school at Llanabba Castle turns out to be fairly mediocre with a terrible academic record, and its school masters are all terrible in their own way, too. Mr Prendergast has ‘doubts’ about religion which has made him unsuitable for the priesthood, and so now he teaches. He wears a wig and is mercilessly mocked by the boys. Captain Grimes has left the army in disgrace, and it seems that no matter what he takes on in life, “I can always get on all right for about five or six weeks, and then I land in the soup.” As a public school man, Grimes represents the ineffectual privileged elite raised with a sense of entitlement. They are people who believe that no matter what they do, it is somehow somebody else’s responsibility to rescue them: “I can’t see a public school man down and out,” he tells Pennyfeather. And beyond the masters is the butler, Philbrick, who may or may not be really Philbrick, is probably not a butler, and who may or not be a criminal embedded in the school to kidnap a student to win a bet. His real identity and past may never be known, since his story is chameleon-like, serving whatever purpose he needs, or whatever audience is listening.

The satirical spine of the novel centres mostly on the careless entitlement of the rich. Lives are bulldozed with barely any consequence. Pennyfeather loses his position at Oxford and his allowance as a result of entitled students at the college, whose characters are accompanied by torturous portmanteau identities, particularly Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, who is a member of the Bollinger club and whose presence will shadow Pennyfeather throughout the novel; Pennyfeather will have to choose him as Best Man for his wedding, despite their history. Consequences always seem to be avoided, except by those who have no social power. A student is accidentally shot with a real pistol used for starting a race at the school, and his slow decline towards death is mentioned occasionally with the same indifference and lack of consequence we learn to expect in other situations as the novel progresses.

Then there is Margot Beste-Chetwynde, whose beauty is an unfortunate lure for Pennyfeather. She is a mother of one of his pupils. Pennyfeather is invited to visit the Beste-Chetwyndes during vacation. Despite Pennyfeather and Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s rapid move towards a marriage, Pennyfeather, we feel, is little more than an adornment for her. She puts him in legal peril without his understanding, and as things seem to go, he is willing to take the blame to protect her.

Her carelessness is suggested by the fickle remodelling and rebuilding of King’s Thursday, an old house she has bought. It is considered one of the best examples of English Renaissance architecture, yet she tears it down and replaces it with a Modernist monstrosity, despite the outrage from the local community. The house contains a,

. . . luminous ceiling . . . and the indiarubber fungi in the recessed conservatory and the little drawing-room, of which the floor was a large kaleidoscope, set in motion by an electric button . . .

Lady Vanburgh describes the drains as “the only tolerable part of the house.” The tenets expressed by Lady Beste-Chetwynde’s young architect, Otto Friedrich Silenus (working on his first major commission, but pretentious enough to call himself ‘professor’) are a clever representation of the fictions of class and privilege that bend the lower orders to their will. Silenus advocates “the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form.” In other words, Silenus feels humanity should submit to the will of its aesthetic environment rather than shaping it, in much the same way that the lower classes bend to the will of their elites. Society does not serve them. In Silenus, Waugh achieves a satirical extreme which underpins much of what is happening in the novel. A foreman, after two hours, finds Silenus just as he had left him:

. . . his fawn-like eyes were fixed and inexpressive, and the hand which had held the biscuit still rose and fell to and from his mouth with a regular motion, while his empty jaw champed rhythmically; otherwise he was totally immobile.

Silenus’ ideas are extreme but he embodies that extreme, more automaton than human. In Silenus’ design, form and purpose are divorced and humanity is degraded. And so we see this as a microcosm of English society and the novel’s characters. Philbrick succeeds because he understands that he must shape himself to the dictates of social class: to become whatever he needs to become. Pennyfeather, however, is subjected to one humiliation after another because his acquiescence shows him beholden to class and its power. In fact, it is not until Pennyfeather has an opportunity to remodel his own self in the closing chapters of the novel that he is able to overcome the oppressive consequences wrought by those with privilege.

Waugh took the title of this novel from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his massive account of the last centuries of the Roman Empire. The allusion suggests a judgement on English society at a specific moment in twentieth-century history, even though, on the surface, it is primarily the story of the decline and fall of several characters, while others maintain their privilege and rank. Decline and Fall is an entertaining and funny account of British society which still enjoys the vestiges of empire. But at the same time, it has been rocked by the devastation of the First World War and the social effects of that, and there are intimations already of a conflict to come.

This novel is really worth reading on its own, simply because it is funny, light-hearted and entertaining, despite (or because of) its satirical intent. But to appreciate that fully, it’s worth starting here then moving on to Vile Bodies, which is broader and richer in its satirical scope.