Vile Bodies

Evelyn Waugh

1930 • 320 pages

Ratings22

Average rating3.7

"A wickedly witty and iridescent novel" (Time) from one of England's greatest satirists takes aim at the generation of Bright Young Things that dominated London high society in the 1920s. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerged, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 1920s London, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercised their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In these pages a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.

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David

Having read, and loved, Brideshead Revisited, I decided to read one of Waugh's earlier novels, namely Vile Bodies. Set in the 1920's amongst the so-called ‘Bright Young Things' the book follows various characters as they flit about London society with seemingly not a care in the world for anyone but themselves. The opening of the book can seem quite off putting with it's short staccato paragraphs and odd collection of names as they travel back to England from the continent aboard a boat caught in bad weather. But after a couple of chapters Vile Bodies settles down into an enjoyable black comedy. There's a sadness running through the book though, as if Waugh knew this was a generation doomed to live for living sake after the horrors of the First World War, without caring what happened to them or the world around them. Waugh's pre-war book are very different to the post-war ones, more comic in tone. But I enjoyed Vile Bodies and will probably cherry pick from his back catalogue.