Evelyn Waugh - A Handful of Dust

In Waugh's biting satire of contemporary social life, Tony Last, a modestly well-to-do landowner in the South of England, allows his bored society wife, Brenda, to take an apartment in London. Brenda promptly takes advantage of her situation to begin a love affair with John Beaver, the social-climbing son of her landlady. (Waugh himself had been similarly betrayed by his apparently heartless wife shortly after their marriage.) After the accidental death of her young son, Brenda asks for a divorce, but Tony decides that he wants to leave England for a while to think things over and sets off on an archaeological expedition into the Brazilian rain forest. There his guide is killed in an accident, and Tony himself nearly succumbs to fever. However, he is rescued by an English hunter, who holds Tony prisoner in his camp in the jungle and forces him to read the novels of Charles Dickens aloud to him, over and over. (Waugh actually witnessed a situation something like this on a trip to British Guiana in 1932). Wau Minimize