Decline and Fall

Name: Decline and Fall
Brand: Hachette Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Evelyn Waugh
ISBN: 9781619693968

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Narrator: Michael Maloney

Unabridged: 5 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Published: 12/11/2012

Categories: Fiction, Classic, Literary Fiction, Satire

Synopsis

Evelyn Waugh's "irresistible" first novel (New York Times) is a brilliant and hilarious satire of English school life in the 1920s.

Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds in Evelyn Waugh's dazzling debut as a novelist, the young run riot and no one is safe, least of all Paul.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Fabian on September 23, 2019

Oh, silly, silly Brits! So eager to defend "honour", "custom", "decency". As if these concepts actually even existed! They did not exist then, just as they sure as hell don't exist now. (Instead, we mingle with the complex & the pseudo-complex.) Like Jude (of "The Obscure" fame), our main man struggl......more

Goodreads review by Paul on November 20, 2014

AN UNPLEASANT ENCOUNTER, OR, THE N WORD IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY Bowling along in this droll farce about the upper classes – if you imagine a line with PG Wodehouse (utter lollery) at one end and Edward St Aubyn (still funny, but black, bitter and bleak) at the other – then Decline and Fall is towa......more

Goodreads review by Ed on April 02, 2018

Decline and Fall is an amusing story, told with great wit, and filled with astute social commentary. Unfortunately the commentary is quite particular to its place and time period. I could not really sustain my interest and enjoyment beyond about a third of the way through. It all got a bit too much.......more

Goodreads review by Mike on August 04, 2024

Saw the TV adaptation some years back and can still visualise David Suchet as Dr Fagan. This farce like story has Paul Pennyfeather losing his life as a monied gent when sent down from University. He is debagged by drunken yahoos and thrown out for running naked through the cloisters. He has to beco......more

Quotes

"Irresistible....One of Waugh's best."—New York Times Book Review

"A savagely comic masterpiece."—Times Literary Supplement

"A world of anarchic fantasy, floodlit with a bland, devastating brilliance....Waugh's people were of two classes, both of whom he knew intimately: the giddy rich and adventurers of vast caddishness....The characters reeled their lunatic way, with sublime insouciance or sublime rascality, through a harlequinade ending in gruesome but hilarious calamity."—Charles J. Rolo, Atlantic Monthly

"Decline and Fall is that all-too-rare phenomenon, a good nonsense novel. Its author has had the happy inspiration to take nothing seriously, and least of all himself. The result is a book which makes more sense than most."—T.S. Matthews, The New Republic

"Surely one of the finest satirical novels of our time, in whcih uplift, religion, romance, and personal animus do not dissipate the satiric intention."—Ernest Jones, The Nation