A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh

4 ideas

1. Tony Last's descent from Hetton to captivity

   Tony Last, an English squire devoted to his Victorian-Gothic house Hetton, loses his wife Brenda to an affair with the idle socialite John Beaver. When their young son John Andrew is killed in a hunting accident, Brenda's first reaction on hearing the news is relief that it was not Beaver who died. Tony flees on an expedition to find a lost city in the Brazilian jungle, falls ill, and ends up the permanent captive of Mr. Todd, an illiterate settler who forces him to read Dickens aloud indefinitely while the outside world declares him dead and Hetton passes to cousins.

2. Tony's romantic code meets a cynical circle

   Tony's code of honour and loyalty rests on a romanticized medieval past embodied in Hetton, and Brenda and her circle, who follow no such code, exploit it. He keeps behaving as a gentleman, for example by staging a fake adultery in Brighton so Brenda can divorce him cleanly. When she uses that cooperation to demand money that would cost him Hetton, he draws a line and withdraws from the divorce.

3. Deadpan narration exposes emotional emptiness

   The narrator reports catastrophe in the same flat, affectless register as gossip and dinner plans, and much of the story is carried by trivial dialogue. This refusal to editorialize makes the reader supply the horror the characters fail to feel. A child's death becomes a social inconvenience, and the moral bankruptcy of the characters shows through in what they don't say.

4. The escape that reproduces the trap

   Tony flees civilization to search for a mythical golden City, which is really a fantasy version of Hetton. In the jungle he finds a smaller, harsher copy of the servitude he left behind. Just as he served an obsolete ideal at home, he now serves Mr. Todd's appetite for Dickens, and the novel shows that romantic flight from a failed life tends to carry its illusions along and recreate its confinement.

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