Vile Bodies
| Vile Bodies | |
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 Jacket of the first UK edition of Vile Bodies |
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| Author(s) | Evelyn Waugh |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Chapman & Hall |
| Publication date | 1930 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | 0141182873 |
| OCLC Number | 42700827 |
| Preceded by | Decline and Fall |
| Followed by | Black Mischief |
Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.
Contents |
[edit] Title
The title comes from the Epistle to the Philippians 3:21. The book was originally to be called "Bright Young Things" (which went on to be the title of Stephen Fry's 2003 film); Waugh changed it because he decided the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that Waugh eventually settled on comes from a comment that the novel's narrator makes in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: 'All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...'[1]
[edit] Style
Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's second and most ostentatiously "modern" novel.[2] Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator.[3] The book was dedicated to B. G. and D. G. (Bryan and Diana Guinness). Waugh claims it was the first novel in which much of the dialogue takes place on the 'phone.
[edit] Summary
Adam Fenwick-Symes is the novel's antihero; 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 the book's end, we find Adam alone on an apocalyptic European battlefield. The book's shift in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation has bothered Okoye.[4][5][6] (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book's composition[7]). Others have defended the novel's curious ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.[8][9]
[edit] Influence
David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence on his composition of the song Aladdin Sane.[10]
A stage adaptation of Vile Bodies, endorsed by the Evelyn Waugh estate, will be staged at the Warwick Arts Centre in March 2012.[11][12]
[edit] Characters
- Adam Fenwick-Symes
- Nina
- Ginger Littlejon
- Colonel Blunt
- The Drunken Major
- Lottie
- Agatha Runcible
- Simon Balcairn
- George Malpractice
[edit] References
- ^ Waugh Vile Bodies, p104.
- ^ Frick "Style and Structure".
- ^ Waugh, Evelyn, Vile Bodies, p. 146. A good example is the death of Simon Balcairn, a declining earl whose gossip columnist name is "Mr. Chatterbox"; his death forms a bridge between chapters VI and VII. ("He shut the door and the window and opened the door of the gas-oven. Inside it was very black and dirty and smelled of meat. He spread a sheet of newspaper on the lowest tray and lay down, resting his head on it. Then he noticed that by some mischance he had chosen Vanburgh’s gossip-page in the Morning Despatch. He put in another sheet. At first he held his breath. Then he thought that was silly and gave a sniff. The sniff made him cough, and coughing made him breathe, and breathing made him feel very ill; but soon he fell into a coma and presently died...Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox.")
- ^ Hastings Evelyn Waugh
- ^ McDonnell Evelyn Waugh.
- ^ Meyers Problem of Evil.
- ^ Waugh Preface to the 1965 edition.
- ^ Hollis Evelyn Waugh.
- ^ O'Dea "What's in a Name?".
- ^ Circus magazine, July 1973
- ^ http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/events/theatre/evelyn-waughs-vile-bodies
- ^ http://evelynwaughvilebodies.wordpress.com/
[edit] Further reading
- Frick, Robert (Fall 1992). "Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh". Papers on Language and Literature 28 (4). ISSN 0031-1294. OCLC 2449428.
- Hastings, Selina (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1856192237. OCLC 34721492.
- Hollis, Christopher (1971). Evelyn Waugh. London: Longman. ISBN 0582010462. OCLC 1159162.
- McDonnell, Jacqueline (1998) [1988]. Evelyn Waugh. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0312016182. OCLC 16900955.
- Meyers, William (1991). Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0571140947. OCLC 23594793.
- O'Dea, Denise (August 2004). "What's in a Name? Or, Vile Bodies Revisited". Philament: an online journal of the arts and culture 4. ISSN 1449-0471. http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue4_Critique_O'Dea.htm.
- DJ Taylor (2007-09-29). "The beautiful and the damned". The Guardian Review, adapted from DJ Taylor's "Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940". http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2179321,00.html. Retrieved 2007-10-08.
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