words by Jocelyn Howarth

Meet the Lasts: a couple in their mid-twenties whose marriage has come to a slow, trundling halt. Tony Last spends his days admiring his inherited Gothic home and mentally noting all the improvements he wishes to make, while Brenda Last makes occasional day trips to London to sate her emotional isolation and returns, exhausted, to the Gothic home she despises. They have little to do with their only son, John Andrew, and they fail to reprimand him for his insolent behaviour, leaving his upbringing to a nanny. They jazz up their life of monotonous routine with unusual diets.

There is no shortage of stories about marriages in fiction: blossoming marriages, failed marriages, revived marriages, stale marriages. ‘Marriage Story’, anyone? A famous example is Simone de Beauvoir’s novella ‘Misunderstanding in Moscow’. The topic is arguably overdone, and my fear entering A Handful of Dust was that it would be dull, dreary, and depressing. Truthfully, it was the complete opposite.

We are introduced first to John Beaver, a shallow socialite trying to navigate the mid-1930s London party scene with no money. A certified mummy’s boy, he sits by the phone all day and complains when no one calls, and is perceived by everyone as no less than pathetic. After such a ruthless establishment of character, Waugh changes the setting to Hetton Abbey, residence of the Lasts, and quotes a description from a county Guide Book which details the family home as ‘devoid of interest’. Tony is undeterred by the review; his love for the building and its grounds is immune to anyone’s criticism, except for Brenda’s. Though Brenda entertains Tony’s passion, she has no love for the house, which she thinks old, outdated and downright unpleasant, her own room more modernised than Tony’s. When John Beaver latches onto an insincere invite from the Lasts and pays a visit to Hetton, Tony does all he can to avoid their guest while Brenda slips into her hostess role easily and takes a liking to Beaver. An affair between Brenda and Beaver follows, the start of a slippery slope into a divorce punctuated by tragedy.

Evelyn Waugh approaches this topic with wit, pep, and a healthy dose of satire. He does not linger on the darkest feelings of a failed marriage, nor make you suffer through paragraphs of self-pity and deep reflection. The story is told mostly through a snappy dialogue which expertly characterises the cast and gives the novel a lively tone. Balancing pity with humour, the novel almost feels like watching real conversations play out — the reader scoffing then gasping at each turn of events.

The plot is not predictable. One may think it is, because we tend to know how a failing marriage story goes, but I promise you won’t have a clue. Waugh takes us from party to party through the empty habits of London’s socialites, with breaks in an outdated Hetton Abbey and then transporting us somewhere else completely for the final act. It all feels faintly ridiculous, a mockery of the meaningless hobbies of the rich, and yet is told with such assertiveness that it was impossible to doubt a single word; a strange story made strong by the rawness of emotion. Waugh manages to make a sad and ultimately tragic story funny. Satire is rooted in truth, and at the heart of this novel lies not just a truth to many who would read it, but to Waugh himself, who drew from his own unhappiness to write a convincing depiction of divorce.

Waugh also weaves the intimacy of Brenda and Tony, regardless of how much they love or even like each other, as a married couple through the pages. Tony understands Brenda’s habits – can recall them easily when off on an adventure post-separation – and likewise Brenda can predict how her husband will react to things. Whether their marriage was a love-match or not, the intimacy they have simply as two people who know each other better than anyone else does is the root of the sadness that keeps the story grounded.

Most characters in this novel are not to be completely hated or loved, for they are all starkly human in their flaws. An exception to this is John Beaver: he is an encapsulation of Waugh’s critiques on society, the pointless frittering of wealth and unfulfilling frivolity of the social season in a decaying era that clings to the pre-WW1 upper-class habits and expectations. The satirical aspect of this novel is less to do with the misery in the divorce and more to do with this society, the worst of it distinguished in Beaver, criticising the emptiness of the 1930s modern life that many still clung on to. In the end, all they have is a handful of dust.

This book is utterly engrossing and, like me, you might also struggle to put it down. The bleak humour was refreshing and the words flowed so well that it was an immensely quick read. There were a few points where I found the story stalling, likely due to the insertion of dense prose that interrupted such snappy, short lines of dialogue. The prose itself was not badly written, but in comparison to the smoothness of the dialogue it felt a lot harder to consume. Infidelity and miserable marriages are a tale as old as time, but this masterful telling is original and shocking, a gem that should not go unnoticed.