This is the third book from my interwar reading list and the first novel. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has long been one of my favourite books, so, looking for novels which best conveyed the attitudes and society of the 20s and 30s I naturally turned back to him. Waugh is the epitome of the upper-class post-WWI generation. Born in 1903, he was a teenager during the war, too young to fight. He was at Oxford in the early 20s, which he evokes so wonderfully in Brideshead Revisited. He was a hanger-on with the aristocratic, gay (in both the modern and older meanings), “bright young things”, and in the 1930s lived almost exclusively in other people’s houses. In my current bedtime read, Chips Channon’s diaries, he appears frequently at various country house parties. This book was published in 1930, when Waugh was 27 and is a comedic satire of him and his set. My edition is a very handsome Folio Society volume. A typically as-new eBay purchase for about the same price as the paperback from Amazon. I bought it especially for my ‘26 reading list, so it’s unread shelf live was mercifully short.

The story is semi-autobiographical. It features a young writer, Adam Symes, as he seeks to acquire funds to marry aristocratic Nina Blount. The money appears and disappears in a quick succession of ridiculous comic turns amid a flurry of visits, adventures, and parties. The book opens with a channel crossing in rough weather. Various characters are introduced, all suffering in their own way from sea sickness. I giggled at the exchange between two sea-sick young women: “Do you think, possibly, we are in danger? Fanny, are we going to be wrecked?” To which Fanny replies, “I should be neither surprised, nor sorry.” The stormy crossing also introduces Mrs Ape, a fake evangelist, and her “angels” a group of pretty young women whose morals are far from christian.

Once back on dry land we find Adam living in an eccentric boarding house in central London. One of the residents, “the major”, recommends that he puts his £1000 of his savings on a horse race - a “sure thing”. Adam agrees, but the major disappears with his money. He is rescued from penury when he is given a job as society columnist for a mass-market newspaper. The previous incumbent incurred the wrath of some aristocratic friends of the proprietor after he reported on one of their parties. Adam is given a long list of names and instructed not to write about them. The list includes the core of London society so he’s reduced to inventing fictitious characters, and ever more ludicrous episodes. It all goes very well for a while and his prospects of marrying Nina look promising. I was surprised at the public interest in the partying of some spoilt aristocrats, but I suppose they were the equivalent of reality TV stars today, whose privileged and vapid lifestyles provided vicarious glamour for the masses?

After a good start, I found the middle of the book rather silly and heavy going. I couldn’t feel much sympathy for the spoilt ridiculous characters; indeed that seemed to be Waugh’s intention, to ridicule both himself and his friends. Perhaps it’s also a good reflection of the aimless, frivolousness, hedonistic, times. A disillusioned generation programmed to find fun in the moment by the slaughter of the war? It’s all rather cartoonish and hard to believe. But it picked up in the second half. There were a couple of very good comedic set piece scenes including a hilarious passage when Adam goes to visit Nina’s father to arrange their marriage only to find him acting in a “talkie”. Arriving, Adam is informed about a “shoot” and there’s a hilarious misunderstanding as he assumes it means shooting pheasants, and various people, not making a film. This is followed by another excellent episode as Adam and some friends attend a motor race and accidentally get involved. The major reappears and says he has Adam’s winnings from the horse race, a total of £37,000, and a fortune at the time. Adam’s elation turns to despair when he then disappears again.

The final chapters were rather bleak. Adam is brought low when Nina tires of waiting for him to find the money and dumps him for another man. A man who Adam had previously befriended. This again is semi-autobiographical as Waugh’s wife also ran off with another man while he was writing the book. He doesn’t have a clean break with Nina, she marries his friend for the money but continues to sleep with Adam. There’s an episode when he masquerades as her husband on a visit to see her father. Finally, and rather improbably (ten years ahead of time), a war suddenly breaks out. In the final scene Adam is pictured in a devastated battlefield where he finally encounters the major who has his £37,000, but now the pound has devalued so much that it’s barely enough for decent meal. We also meet one of Mrs Ape’s angels, who has become an itinerant war prostitute and is now in the service of the major.

At various points while reading Vile Bodies, I half regretted choosing it. It is a very silly book. I do enjoy a comedy, but at some points it plodded along with too many of the jokes missing the mark. I suspect much of the humour made sense in the 1920s, but went over my head in the 2020s. However, now having read the whole thing, I do think it paints a very good picture of the hedonistic upper-class culture of the time. It’s sobering to think that these vapid party animals would be fighting for their lives just a decade later. It is what makes Brideshead Revisited so poignant; the sense of a lost arcadia of carefree youth. It’s also full of the world-changing innovations of the time, motor cars and motor racing, cinema, telephones - it’s apparently one of the first novels to accurately portray a phone call, with an entire (short) chapter dedicated to the phone call when Nina dumps Adam. The youthful slang of the time is great fun and when the jokes hit, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. On the whole very enjoyable.