Decline and Fall

"It’s the anarchy. My attitude to Waugh is complicated, in that I deplore the cynicism, but I revel in the anarchy — I love the capacity to say so beautifully not merely the unsayable but almost the unthinkable. Waugh is so good at this business of letting us imagine that life goes arse-over-tip and then seeing what happens. This is what happens with Paul Pennyfeather. He’s sent down for drunkenness — but, of course, he hasn’t been drunk, he’s a victim of the Bollinger club. He ends up teaching at a shambolic school called Llanabba Castle, which pretty much echoes what happened to Waugh when he was a disillusioned, dissipated and indebted young man. Waugh was differently horrible at different points in his life. His diaries and letters of this period are worth reading. But some of the characters! Think of Captain Grimes, of Mr Prendergast shooting Lord Tangent in the foot and ending up having his head cut off. The extraordinary unregenerate wickedness of Mrs Beste-Chetwynde. It’s splendid, it’s endlessly splendid."