Week Forty-One - Jeanette

A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

Recommended by Rebecca

You know those people who carry themselves so assuredly? Those people where everything they like is spot on? Those people who never suffer from l’esprit de l’escalier – the French term for thinking of a wonderful comeback way after the moment has passed?

True, these people are useful for talking to about the latest Josephine Foster album, but overall one gives their perfect arse a wide berth. BUT NOT OUR BECK! She has all of the above – no-one, but no-one, is cooler than she – but it’s all dwarfed by her sincerity and kindness. She is a true pleasurable presence in my life.

And I get to talk to her about the latest Josephine Foster album. Bonus.

Given how exemplary Beck’s taste is (and that I’ve wanted to read Evelyn Waugh for some considerable time), I was very much looking forward to this.

            ‘I’m afraid I’ve rather bitched your evening.’

A Handful Of Dust is chockablock with these memorable expressions. In one sense, it is a black satire on the British landed gentry coming to terms with their role in a modern world that doesn’t really know what to do with them. In another sense, it’s a black satire on the British attitude to marriage, especially when divorce offers a beguiling getaway from it.

But, in yet another sense, it’s a black, but non-satirical and deeply affecting, story of how, when we take life-altering decisions, we expect to be (at least psychologically) rewarded for them. We very seldom are.

Brenda and Tony Last, married with one young son, live in the crumbling country manor Hetton Abbey.

In order to make an appearance of coffered wood, moulded slats had been nailed in a chequer across the plaster. The squares between were decorated alternatively with Tudor roses and fleurs-de-lis. But damp had penetrated into one corner, leaving a large patch where the gilt had tarnished and the colour flaked away; in another place the wooden laths had become warped and separated from the plaster.

Tony loves his family home, and that’s just as well, since the thing takes up virtually all his capital. Brenda is less enamoured, insisting on a ‘modern bed’ and seeing the whole thing as an anachronistic money pit. The Lasts have rather aimless lives: visiting people, parties, gossiping, getting out of things they don’t want to do. The depiction of this particular strata of society reminded me of Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Regle Du Jeu: there’s money, but there’s no purpose, and an impending sense that the whole class is moribund.

Brenda, uninterested in Hetton, makes frequent trips to London and eventually takes a flat there. How things haven’t changed, from then till now, in the capital’s private rented sector.

It was in a large, featureless house, typical of the district. […] After the first flight the staircase changed from a marble to a faded carpet.

Brenda uses the glorified bedsit as a base to conduct an affair with the charmless freeloader John Beaver. The relationship between John and Brenda, and how it is received in society, is where Waugh is at his spikiest.

Opinion was greatly in favour of Brenda’s adventure. The morning telephone buzzed with news of her; even people with whom she had the barest acquaintance were delighted to relate that they had seen her and Beaver the evening before at a restaurant or cinema. It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together.

Brenda isn’t in love with John, nor he with her; they don’t even seem to be having much fun. The overriding motivation for their dalliance is boredom. But the affair doesn’t even chase that away. Rather, their relationship becomes just another thing for them to get bored of. 

As for the cuckolded Tony, even before he fully admits it, he knows his marriage is on tilt and that he is losing Brenda. But he is also powerless to stop it. Tony feels no anger towards John; he realises that, if not him, it would be someone else. Waugh, with merciless and brilliant prose, depicts a state where love has been so debased that it becomes a mockery of itself. No-one quite knows what or how to feel anymore; all that’s left are the motions to go through, which the characters do with mechanical ennui.

Fitting in with the overall cynical tone of A Handful Of Dust, divorce is the thing that’s romanticised. It’s always there within a marriage, offering an escape route, a path to carefree freedom. When Brenda initiates proceedings against Tony, the whole thing becomes a very dark farce.

            ‘How’s the old boy taking it?’

            ‘Not so well. It makes me feel rather a beast,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m afraid he minds a lot.’

            ‘Well, you wouldn’t like it if he didn’t,’ said Polly to console her.

            ‘No, I suppose not.’

Yet in the second half of the book, and especially towards the very end, Waugh does inject far more humanity. He is especially sympathetic to Tony, but even Brenda is portrayed with a measure of compassion (although Beaver remains an absolute arsehole). Divorce is not the romantic adventure one would hope for, but yet another unhappy state from which people must look to break away from. Probably back into marriage, and so the whole despairing dance sets off once again.

A cheerful read, then. As befits the cheerful Evelyn Waugh.

Fellow writer James Lees-Milne called Waugh ‘the nastiest-tempered man in England’. Waugh believed that class divisions were natural and hated any attempt to rectify inequalities. He sent a bottle of champagne to someone he’d just sued the living shit out of. He was a Christian but struggled with his faith, chiefly because it meant he was supposed to be nice to his fellow man. ‘If I weren’t a Christian,’ he once told Nancy Mitford, ‘I would be even more horrible.’

A Handful Of Dust felt like a significant book for me to read at this stage of my life, an experience beyond simply enjoying a brilliantly observed and gripping story. It made me measure my own pessimism. First achievement: I am far less cynical than Evelyn Waugh. Second, and more noteworthy, achievement: I am far less cynical than I feared myself to be.

Week Three - Jude

The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall (2011)

Recommended by Rebecca Bream

I love short stories. They don't take long to read, after all. When it's been a cow of week – as my last one has with work – reading one on the way home is always a treat. When they're good, they're  lovely half-hours of pleasure, like an episode of a soap opera when you've just got in, or a hot bath with your favourite magazine. In Sarah Hall's case though, these half-hours usually involve bigger, fuller language, and far fewer ads.

Rebecca Bream – Beck – recommended me this book. She's not long had her second son, and told me she lapped this up. Beck is cool as fuck, calm, funny, and an Actual Proper Journalist, someone who's worked down diamond mines and oil rigs while I've been at home in my 'jamas. My fondest memories are her are at my wedding, simultaneously DJing and dancing to The Breeders on a bench in stockinged feet. Aso, if you want a crash course in getting to the front of a moshpit, with charm rather than bother, then Beck's your girl.

Booker Prize-shortlisted and longlisted, Sarah Hall is also an impressive woman. Her four novels up to now (I say confidently, having had a quick scan through her website) have explored the destruction of 1930s Cumbria, dystopian sci-fi, the world of fine art, and a man who leaves Morecambe Bay for Coney Island. This is her first book of short stories, and I'll admit here and now that I found few of them tough. Hall writes the kind of prose that book reviewers call “luminous” – a metaphor that's always stuck in my craw, because words don't bloody glow. But she does describe nature in bright colours, and with plenty of texture.

Take the first page of The Nightlong River. It involves “November berries...hung and clotted in the bushes, ripe and red, like blisters of blood”. “Yarrow and rowan” hanging out “their own gaudy bunting”. Hawthorns sending “the hedgerows as ruddy as battle”. Typing those phrases out now, they read beautifully, don't they? I suppose what I wanted from that story from the start was more pace – a plot that grabbed me straightaway, that didn't take its merry time to gently weave me in. I also realise this shows my flaws as a reader, much more than it shows Sarah Hall's as a writer.

I wasn't surprised to find out that Sarah Hall's also a poet. As well as that fulsome, visual stuff she conjures up, she's always leaving little mysteries that never get solved. I loved the book's title story (are they called title stories?) and how Hall slowly unravelled the tale of its protagonist and her lover – but never completely. I also gobbled up The Agency, which I suddenly realise was another saucy offering. No, I haven't – and won't – read Fifty Shades Of Grey, but I bet this is ruder and filthier. Rather than disclosing the mucky details that are suggested within it, we find our protagonist going into her living room, hours later, to “clear up the children's mess”. The gaps in our knowledge aren't filled. We're allowed imaginations.

My favourite story was Bees, about a woman who'd just moved to London, which began with her sitting in a garden, thinking about the dead insects around her. Typical me, really: it's the second shortest story here. But its description of a character losing something – still wanting something they shouldn't really have – captured feelings I'd once had, so powerfully, so dramatically, that I found myself suddenly standing up between Tottenham Hale and Blackhose Road.

I mean, that's a proper short story, isn't it? I'll definitely allow Sarah more time. One of these days – she says, contemplating next week's book with fear – I might even allow myself some.