Vile Bodies
by Evelyn Waugh

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Book Reviews of Vile Bodies

Book Review: A tale of Bright Young Things, during the Empire's decline
Summary: 5 Stars

This also features drunk on wine, silly conversations, and silly names, such as a stern evangelist named Mrs. Ape, an ex-PM named Outrage, peers named Lady Circumference, and a group of girls dressed as angels who perform for Ms. Ape's Christian charity. Their names represent certain virtues: Fortitude, Chastity, Faith, Humility, Prudence, Creative Endeavour, and the like, i.e. Victorian values. Yet their names do not mirror their personalities, as many of them bicker among themselves, which symbolizes the coming apart of Victorian values.

The story focuses on Adam Fenwick-Symes, a struggling and penniless writer whose success is like a series of W's: down, up, down, up... and so on. Having his novel, an autobiography, burned at customs for being possibly subversive, is just one of the misfortunes he runs into. He's engaged to Nina Blount, an engagement that hinges a lot on his being solvent. The most repeated lines by him: "I say Nina, we shan't be able to get married after all." or other variants.

Among his misadventures includes trying to track down a drunken major to whom he entrusted a thousand pounds on a longshot at the track, the numerous wild parties he goes to at the most happening places to be, "masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties,...parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes,...all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...all those vile bodies," and trying to get Colonel Blount his blessing to be married to Nina, is itself a challenge, as the irascible colonel's memory is such that he's got quite a loose propeller.

But Adam's brief tenure as the gossip columnist detailing parties, of who was there wearing what, is itself a portrait of how the upward mobile, socially conscious trendies are addicted in trying to be where it's cool, even when Adam invents people and visiting a lunatic asylum, gives them noble names and describes their ailments!

Of the decadent Young Things, Angela Runcible has the most exciting moments, as she wakes up after a rowdy party dressed in a revealing Hawaiian outfit, embarrasses the family she stayed over at during breakfast, and goes outside the door to the delight of reporters. The address? Oh, somewhere in Downing Street.

There's a conversation on the younger generation between Father Rothschild and the ex-PM, where Rothschild remarks on the generation gap. From the Victorian value of "if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well," to the Bright Young People's "If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all." Rothschild mentions it also relates at a need for permanance, such as marriage, given the word "bogus" that the BYP use, years before Bill and Ted, and the number of growing divorces. And that's something Adam says, that a marriage should go on.

Vile Bodies is one of those great birds, a historical snapshot set among the jaded and decadent pre-war Young Things during the decline of the British Empire, all because Modernism is showing the upper hand over Victorian values. This decadence and pluck of youth would be reduplicated in the late 1950's, when the teenagers took power, but that's another era of Britain altogether.

Summary of Vile Bodies

Humor Books

• Subjects > Humor & Entertainment > Humor
• Literature & Fiction > Classics
• Literary