His target is the rising, newly acquisitive would-be upper middle-class who are busily engaged in nudging aside the older, landed upper class families who have grown lumpen and bogged down in lethargic tradition. This is Waugh at his most penetratingly critical, wryly satirical and, as always, exquisitely cynical. I’m glad to say at the very outset of this review that I finished the book entirely confirmed in my initial opinion.

Well, that’s not the case at all – in fact quite the opposite. This rather rambling introduction sounds like I’m setting up to say that I need to revise my opinion or downgrade my opinion of the book. I didn’t stay in teaching long enough to really find out but teaching the book did at least give me the chance to get to know it pretty well.īut following my recent email claims about how this was Waugh’s crowning glory, it occurred to me that it must have been something like four decades since I last read the book and maybe, just maybe, my belief in it might be a bit displaced? So when I scooped up the first edition Penguin copy in its rather understated orange and white livery it seemed to be an opportune moment to go back and confirm whether this was as substantial a read as I had remembered.

In an exchange of emails with one of Letterpress’ regular guest book reviewers after he had submitted his insightful piece on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I rather blithely asserted that in my view Brideshead was not Waugh’s masterpiece and that that accolade should go to his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust.īack in the late 1970s when I was a new teacher of English in a Sandwell secondary school, A Handful of Dust was one of the books on the ‘A’ level English curriculum and, even then as I was coaxing them through it, I was puzzled about what a small group of, albeit pretty bright, 16 and 17 year olds were making of Waugh’s world.

A handful of dust by evelyn waugh