Vile Bodies
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Vile Bodies is a novel by Evelyn Waugh.
First published in 1930, it is a brilliant satire of decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.
Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T.S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's most ostentatiously 'modern' novel (Frick, 1992). Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator. Adam Fenwick-Symes is the novel's unheroic hero; his quest to marry Nina parodies the conventions of romantic comedy, as the traditional foils and allies prove distracted and ineffectual. War looms, Adam's circle of friends disintegrates, and Adam and Nina's engagement flounders. At book's end, we find Adam alone on an apocalyptic European battlefield.
This shift in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation has bothered some critics (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage half-way through the book's composition). Others have defended the novel's curious ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance. For the first view, see Hastings (1994), McDonnell (1998) and Meyers (1991); for the second, see Hollis (1971) and O'Dea (2004). Full references are listed below.
In 2003 the film Bright Young Things, based on Vile Bodies and directed by Stephen Fry, was released.
References
Frick, Robert (1992). 'Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh'. Papers on Language and Literature 28(4) (Fall 1994).
Hastings, Selina (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Hollis, Christopher (1971). Evelyn Waugh. London: Longman.
McDonnell, Jacqueline (1998). Evelyn Waugh. London: Macmillan.
Meyers, William (1991). Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil. London: Faber & Faber.
O'Dea, Denise (2004). 'What's in a Name? Or, Vile Bodies Revisited'. Philament [1] (http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue4_Critique_O'Dea.htm) Issue 4 (August, 2004).