Vile Bodies
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Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising decadent young London society between World War I and World War II. 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 the 2003 Stephen Fry 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 protagonist, Adam Fenwick-Symes, makes to his financee Nina when talking about their party-driven lifestlye: 'All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...'[1]
Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's most ostentatiously "modern" novel[2]. Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator. The book was dedicated to B. G. and D. G. (Bryan and Diana Guinness).
David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence on his composition of the song Aladdin Sane.[citation needed]
[edit] Summary
Adam Fenwick-Symes is the novel's unheroic hero; 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 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 some critics.[3][4][5] (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book's composition[citation needed]). Others have defended the novel's curious ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.[6][7]
[edit] References
- 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 [1988] (1998). 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.
- DJ Taylor (2007-09-29). The beautiful and the damned (HTML). The Guardian Review, adapted from DJ Taylor's "Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940". Retrieved on 2007-10-08.
