Everyone will agree that Brideshead Revisited offers one of the best portrayals of idealised Oxford in fiction―quaint, idyllic, carefree and so on. If you are looking for a similar vibe in Decline and Fall, which is another Waugh and partly set in Oxford, I can assure you, you better search somewhere else. That said, there is no reason why you should not read it. Throw ‘the city of dreaming spires’ out the window. Just let Mr Waugh take you wherever his whim navigates and see what happens.
Paul Pennyfeather is a studious scholarship student reading theology at Oxford. After accidentally getting involved in the annual Bollinger riot one evening－the Bollinger Club being a group of ‘top-drawer’ students at Oxford―he is caught being completely stripped off in the middle of the college quad and sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour to begin his teaching career at Llanabba Castle, an all-boys public school, where he meets several dubious characters both teachers and students alike. In fact, there is not a character who isn’t dubious in some way in Decline and Fall. There is Captain Grimes, a drunk colleague who always gets in the soup but somehow manages to get out of trouble with his easy-going mindset. Mr Prendergast, or Prendy, the object of ridicule among the students, is a former clergyman and, suffering from doubts in his faith, leaves his living to find himself in a place full of obnoxious kids. Philbrick, one of the servants at the school, has numerous feats about himself to tell. There are more, such as Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a beautiful single mother of one of the students, also involved in a shady business, and let us not forget Pots, Paul’s best friend at Scone College, who also turns out rather untrustworthy.
In response to a series of outrageous events inflicted upon him, Paul does what a protagonist is least likely to do; he just accepts everything, totally impassive. He does neither rebel nor bemoan his fate. He seems to be just an observer of a series of events surrounding him. I presume this is what deadpan comedy is meant to be, though such kind of humour is quite foreign to me.
Paul reminds me of the eponymous cat in Soseki Natsume’s I am a Cat. There is a remarkable similarity between the two novels. They are both social satires that expose the phoniness of human life from the perspective of a quiet observer. They both involve schoolmasters and a lot of other dubious characters. In the end, the cat dies and so does Paul (though not quite). Come to think of it, they really are quite similar!
It is currently half past 10 pm. My eyes are getting heavier and heavier as I am writing this. Time to go to bed.