A review by jenmcmaynes
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

4.0

Such an unsettling book! It starts fairly light as a comedy of manners, skewering Britain’s upper class. I smiled a lot; even though my sympathies were firmly w Tony, Waugh’s turns of phrase and character sketches of Brenda, Beaver, and Jenny Abdul Akbar were all funny and I was enjoying myself. Then the tragedy of the son’s death, and suddenly the tone of the book shifted to something darker and more exploratory. Suddenly Tony is a man adrift, unmoored from his family home and his wife, and he washes ashore (if you will) in Brazil, in the clutches of a madman, forcing him to read Dickens for the rest of his life. Lots of commentary re the mores of the British upper classes, especially about fidelity and money, versus the natives and Catholics Tony finds in the New World. And in the end, would he have been happy if he could have gone back? I can’t wait to discuss this with my book club!