Right now I'm in the middle of reading Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. I think it's the second thing I've read by him. I read The Loved One a long time ago, and was quite entertained by it.
Vile Bodies is a strange one. It's very dialogue heavy, and its tone suggests that everything happening is pure gossip fodder. But certain characters are given transparently metaphorical nicknames like Mrs. Ape and Mr. Outrage. There's a bit of Medieval allegory in that.
At the point this novel was written one world-spanning war had finished and another was on its way, although few predicted it at that point. (Hitler wasn't yet in power.) The world, and certainly England, is decompressing out of psychic necessity.
This is actually the world of early Agatha Christie as well. The difference isn't the murder, it's the somewhat older detectives able to make sense of the murder. Those are in Christie, not here.
Vile Bodies is a strange one. It's very dialogue heavy, and its tone suggests that everything happening is pure gossip fodder. But certain characters are given transparently metaphorical nicknames like Mrs. Ape and Mr. Outrage. There's a bit of Medieval allegory in that.
At the point this novel was written one world-spanning war had finished and another was on its way, although few predicted it at that point. (Hitler wasn't yet in power.) The world, and certainly England, is decompressing out of psychic necessity.
This is actually the world of early Agatha Christie as well. The difference isn't the murder, it's the somewhat older detectives able to make sense of the murder. Those are in Christie, not here.
2 comments:
It must be thirty years ago that I read several novels by Evelyn Waugh, among them most certainly was Vile Bodies. But I can't say I remember any particularities about it other than the fact it was one of his earliest. The ones I remember best are The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited - unsurprisingly since they are his most famous.
What I also recall hearing about Waugh was that he despised the century into which he'd been born - hated cars, planes, and telephones too. One can only imagine how depressed he'd be at this point. As you mentioned, he entered the world not long before the First World War and experienced the Second. I remember my parents talking about the tremendous changes they'd encountered during that period too. Goodness knows, we've seen much that could never have been anticipated either but not in the same way that earlier generation did.
Speaking of Agatha Christie, the books I've been re-reading from that period are Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey series. The first, Whose Body, was written in 1923 when Peter has returned from the War along with the inimitable highly skilled Bunter who was his sergeant. You're right that the detectives then explained the crimes as a way, perhaps, of making sense of the world.
I remember The Loved One being hilarious when I read it. Think I was in my teens but it did tickle my funny bone. I also caught a whiff of melancholy off of it, in that the protagonist is maybe too sane to relate to the people around him. That might be a running theme of Waugh's.
Yes, he'd probably be pretty miserable in today's environment. I can imagine disliking the changes that the early 20th century wrought, especially when they were accompanied by two lethal world wars and a lot of smaller tragedies. Technological change then was more traumatic, maybe. Now I see it as being more alienating. It creates a world that, if you're over a certain age, you're not part of.
I do think detective fiction took the shape it did because of the time it was created. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes had been huge at the turn of the century but he and his contemporaries could have turned out to be a sui generis thing, a fad that burnt out by 1910 or so. But war and social/economic displacement led to a new popularity and a new kind of symbolism. Even Nero Wolfe was created when the effects of the stock market crash were still being felt.
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