A Handful of Dust Summary: Evelyn Waugh's Satire of a Collapsing English Life
What A Handful of Dust is about
Published in 1934, A Handful of Dust belongs to the run of satirical comic novels that made Evelyn Waugh famous before the Second World War. It is also the one critics tend to single out as different. The jokes are still there, but the undertow is serious, and many commentators treat the book as a transitional work pointing towards the Catholic fiction Waugh wrote after the war.
The setup is simple. Tony Last is a country gentleman living at Hetton Abbey, his ancestral home, with his wife Brenda and their eight-year-old son John Andrew. Hetton is a Victorian neo-Gothic pastiche. The local guide book calls it architecturally devoid of interest. Brenda calls it ugly. Tony loves it completely, and his devotion to it stands in for everything else he believes about how life should be arranged.
Brenda is bored. In London she meets John Beaver, a dull and insignificant young man she recognises as dull and insignificant, and begins an affair with him anyway. She starts spending her weeks in town and persuades Tony to pay for a small flat, rented from Beaver's mother, a sharp operator in the property business. Everyone in their London circle knows. Tony does not. Attempts by Brenda's friends to supply him with a mistress of his own fail absurdly.
The first half of the novel is a comedy of manners about adultery conducted in plain sight. The second half takes Tony to the Brazilian interior on an expedition in search of a lost city. Waugh had made his own journey into South America in 1933 and 1934, and incidents and people from that trip went into the book. Tony's fate in the jungle had already appeared as a standalone short story in 1933, titled "The Man Who Liked Dickens". Waugh also drew on something closer to home: he had recently been deserted by his young wife.
The main characters
Tony Last is contented and shallow, and the novel is unsparing about both qualities. He is not cruel, merely incurious, and his illusions are removed from him one at a time. Brenda is more interesting than a simple villain. She is restless, candid with herself about Beaver's limitations, and capable of a cruelty she does not quite intend.
John Beaver is the hollow centre of the London plot. He has no money, no particular charm and no real appetite for anything except advantage. Mrs Beaver, his mother, turns other people's unhappiness into lettings and interior decoration. Dr Messinger, the explorer Tony meets after his marriage collapses, is confident and badly out of his depth. Mr Todd, the British Guianan who rules a small family in a jungle clearing, is the figure most readers remember. He is illiterate and owns the complete works of Charles Dickens.
The themes
Class runs through everything. Tony's position, his house and his income are the fixed points his wife negotiates around, and the divorce settlement turns into a bald question of whether Hetton must be sold. Love is treated as a word people use while doing something else. Morality is handled through the machinery of respectable divorce, including a hired woman in Brighton and manufactured evidence.
Death arrives in the middle of the book and is met with one of the most quoted reactions in English fiction. Waugh had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930, and his secular satires drew hostility from some Catholic readers. He put no overt religion into this novel, but later said he meant it to show the futility of humanist values as against religious ones. The jungle half tests that idea to destruction.
How it ends
Brenda is in London when John Andrew is killed in a riding accident. Told that "John is dead", she assumes Beaver has died, and on learning the truth says "Thank God!" She asks for a divorce. Tony agrees to protect her reputation, then discovers she wants a sum that would force the sale of Hetton. He withdraws, and leaves for Brazil with Messinger. The guides abandon them, Tony falls ill and Messinger drowns going for help. Delirious, Tony is taken in by Mr Todd, nursed back to health and asked to read Dickens aloud. When he asks to leave, Todd refuses. A search party arrives; Todd drugs Tony, hides him and hands over his wristwatch so the searchers have something to take back to England. Tony is condemned to read Dickens in the jungle indefinitely. At home he is presumed dead, his cousins inherit Hetton and put up a memorial, and Brenda marries a friend of his.
Why it still matters
Initial reviews were modest, but readers took to it, and the book has never been out of print. Its reputation has risen steadily. It is now generally counted among Waugh's best work and has appeared more than once on unofficial lists of the finest novels of the twentieth century. It has been adapted for radio, stage and screen. It suits readers who want social comedy with a hard edge, and anyone interested in how English satire turned from mockery to something bleaker in the 1930s.
