Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic, 24 Jun 2003
This is one of the books that made me love english litterature. It is so wonderfully absurd and at the same time accurate in it's description of british society and education around 1930. When I sometime tires of Wodehouse and the constant mix-ups of his (otherwise wonderful) tales about Jeeves & Wooster, Psmith or Blandings Castle, Waugh is my choice. It is down to earth, but extremely funny. Young man Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford due, through no fault of his own, to indecent behaviour. He becomes schoolmaster at a school in Wales which, frankly, is not very good. He falls in love, and the rest of the plot is for you to find out. I can tell you, however, that in this book Waugh covers so diverse subjects as prisons, religion, education, architecture (at this point, one might rightly wonder if it's Bentham I'm reviewing instead of Waugh, but no!), glamour, greed, insanity, worldwide cooperation, Welsh music, teenage boys and alcohol. And even if you like or dislike some, or most of these things, Waugh makes them seem so absurd that you can't help but smile at his descriptions of everyday life in those very specific circles. Go on and read it - it's cheap, it's a classic and it is one of the most entertaining and clever books I've ever read.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fantastic satire about '30s society, school, and prison, 19 Nov 2001
By A Customer
To anyone who has been to a prep school at any stage in their life, whether as pupil or as teacher, this is the essential reading for them, and for those who have not, it is the still going to be one of the best reads they have ever had. Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from university due to an unfortunate encounter with a drunken member of the Bollinger Club (whose yearly meetings are often forbidden because of their lunatic antics such as destroying one student's grand piano and grinding his cigars into the floor - incidentally, the club is still going, although its real name is the Bullingdons Club) consults a job agency and is sent to a small prep school in North Wales, called Llanabba Castle, run by an aged eccentric, Dr Fagin. The teachers in the school are the archetypal prep school figures, reminiscent of Geoffrey Williams and Ronald Searle creation's teachers at St Custards: Captain Grimes, the one legged cad who has an unhappy love affair with Dingy, the daughter of Dr Fagin; Mr Prendergast, an elderly teacher who made the mistake of wearing a wig on his first day and could not take it off without incurring more laughter from the boys; and Philbrick, the dogsbody, conman, and jewel thief. The boys are no better, but the parents are certainly worse: Lady Circumference, mother of little Lord Tangent (who is shot in the foot by a drunken Mr Prendergast at the start of one of the races at the disastrous sports day, which is one of the most amusing single events in the novel) is an awful woman, very, very upper-class, and very full of herself. Paul finds himself falling in love with a mother of one of his pupils, Mrs Beste-Chetwynde, and it is this love, innocent and trusting, that leads on to the exciting and tragic tale of the decline and fall of a public school boy...
Evelyn Waugh carries this story off with his customary excellence: indeed, this is one of his comic masterpieces. We can identify with the characters, who are so well depicted that we can see them, imagine that we have met them before, sympathise with their numerous problems and delight in their successes. My cousin recommended this book to me, and I enjoyed it so much that I have not only read it several times since but also read most of his other novels, and I consider him the finest author of the last century.
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of Waugh's greatest satires, 14 Jan 2004
Having recently read Waugh's BBC Big Read-nominated 'Brideshead Revisited,' I was encouraged by reviews of others that Decline and Fall was as good, if not better, than Brideshead. I found Decline and Fall to have many more laugh-out-loud moments than its predecessor, although I did not feel there was as much depth to the story.Waugh begins the book by describing a rather subdued young Oxford student, Paul Pennyfeather. By an unfortunate turn of wittily constructed events however, Paul is thrown out of the university for indecent behaviour when a group of rowdy youths strip him of his clothes, and he is forced to run naked around the school grounds. With no choice but to apply for a job, the unlucky character finds himself working as a teacher in a bizarre Welsh school. True to Waugh's wonderfully imaginative style of writing, Paul's colleagues are drunks and/or idiots, and the students irritating half-wits. Paul's series of amusing episodes culminates when he is on the brink of marrying a rather eccentric aristocratic lady, when he is thrown in to prison. Although Paul's escapades were hugely entertaining, the series of coincidences he encounters eventually left me feeling rather frustrated, as the reader was being asked to suspend his or her disbelief to a ludicrous level. This small negative point, however, was far outweighed by the splendid array of eccentric characters, most notably Paul's fellow school masters Captain Grimes (frequently 'in the soup') and the lovable (yet completely potty) Mr Prendergast, who at one point during a sports day race, accidentally shoots one of the pupils in the foot with the starting gun. Waugh was undoubtedly one of the greatest satirists of his day, and although written in nineteen twenty-eight, Decline and Fall remains a witty, hugely comic novel to this day. Those who have enjoyed the book may also enjoy 'Vile Bodies' by the same author. Paul and his peculiar friends brightened my evenings considerably. I urge you to give it a read.
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