I’ve just finished Evelyn Waugh’s third novel, A Handful of Dust, and am left in awe of his ability to scathe so economically. Once you become attuned to the nuances in Waugh’s prose — the perfectly-apt adjectives, the paragraphs which end just when they need to end — you appreciate how little excess there is on the page; which points out how flabby many modern novels are by comparison. Having just waded through one unnecessarily-long novel for review, and still mired in another, similarly bloated example for my book group, I’m sure that I will find myself reaching for a machete when I eye the next 500 page doorstopper excreted by the press.

What I particularly liked in A Handful of Dust were Waugh’s lists. They are marvels of economy, gatherings of items which strip the subject bare, leaving them as fully revealed to us as a flensed whale. I’ll give a few examples, beginning with the contents of John Beaver’s “dark little sitting room (on the ground floor, behind the dining room)” at the home in Sussex Gardens that he shares with his mother:

The elderly parlourmaid […] dusted, polished and maintained in symmetrical order on his dressing table and on the top of his chest of drawers, the collection of sombre and bulky objects that had stood in his father’s dressing room; indestructible presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass-bound, covered in pigskin, crested and gold mounted, suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity — racing flasks and hunting flasks, cigar cases, tobacco jars, jockeys, elaborate meerschaum pipes, button hooks and hat brushes.

Wonderful! You feel that each word was personally selected, the “indestructible” presents showing by their haphazard miscellany that John Beaver’s father (and, by implication, his heir) has no depth or breeding. Then there’s this list of the architectural features of Hetton, Tony Last’s inherited family seat, of which he is unshakeably, blindly fond:

There was not a glazed brick or encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony’s heart. In some ways, he knew, it was not convenient to run; but what big house was? It was not altogether amenable to modern ideas of comfort; he had many small improvements in mind, which would be put into effect as soon as the death duties were paid off. But the general aspect and atmosphere of the place; the line of its battlements against the sky; the central clock tower where quarterly chimes disturbed all but the heaviest sleepers; the ecclesiastical gloom of the great hall, its ceilings groined and painted in diapers of red and gold, supported on shafts of polished granite with vine-wreathed capitals, half-lit by day through lancet windows of armorial stained glass, at night by a vast gasolier of brass and wrought iron, wired now and fitted with twenty electric bulbs; the blasts of hot air that rose suddenly at one’s feet, through grills of cast-iron trefoils from the antiquated heating apparatus below; the cavernous chills of the more remote corridors where, economizing in coke, he had had the pipes shut off; the dining hall with its hammer-beam roof and pitch-pine minstrels’ gallery; the bedrooms with their brass bedsteads, each with a frieze of Gothic text, each named from Malory, Yseult, Elaine, Mordred and Merlin, Gawaine and Bedivere, Lancelot, Perceval, Tristram, Galahad, his own dressing room, Morgan le Fay, and Brenda’s Guinevere, where the bed stood on a dias, the walls hung with tapestry, the fireplace like a tomb of the thirteenth century, from whose bay window one could count, on days of exceptional clearness, the spires of six churches — all these things with which he had grown up were a source of constant delight and exultation to Tony; things of tender memory and proud possession.

Another mish-mash, but Waugh has complete confidence in his reader, realizing that he does not need to spell his judgement out. Then there are the contents of Morgan le Fay, Tony Last’s dressing room at Hetton:

Morgan le Fay had been his room since he left the night nursery. He had been put there so that he would be within calling distance of his parents (inseparable in Guinevere), for until quite late in life he was subject to nightmares. He had taken nothing from the room since he slept there, but every year added to its contents, so that it now formed a gallery representative of every phase of his adolescence — the framed picture of a dreadnought (a coloured supplement from Chums), all its guns spouting flame and smoke; a photographic group of his private school; a cabinet called ‘the Museum,’ filled with the fruits of a dozen desultory hobbies, eggs, butterflies, fossils, coins, his parents in a leather diptych which had stood by his bed at school, Brenda, eight years ago when he had been trying to get engaged to her; Brenda with John, taken just after the christening; an aquatint of Hetton, as it had stood until his great-grandfather demolished it; some shelves of books, Bevis, Woodwork at Home, Conjuring for All, The Young Visitors, The Law of Landlord and Tenant, Farewell to Arms.

That lonely Hemingway title says so much just by its inclusion in the list: Tony is evidently a reader with no real interest in literature, having probably picked that one up when it was the bestseller of the day (I wouldn’t be surprised if a subtle jab by Waugh at Hemingway was meant as well). Then there is this list of the items chosen by Mrs Beaver as suggested furnishings (all refused) for Brenda’s flat in London:

a set of needlework pictures for the walls, […] an electric bed warmer, a miniature weighing machine for the bathroom, a frigidaire, an antique grandfather clock, a backgammon set of looking-glass and synthetic ivory, a set of prettily bound French eighteenth-century poets, a massage apparatus, and a wireless set fit in a case of Regency lacquer

and this list of supplies, in support of Dr. Messinger’s expedition into the jungle in search of the lost city of the Pie-wie, stowed belowdecks in “two vast crates, bearing his name and labelled not wanted on the voyage”:

Crates containing such new and unfamiliar possessions as a medicine chest, an automatic shotgun, camping equipment, pack saddles, a cinema camera, dynamite, disinfectants, a collapsible canoe, filters, tinned butter and, strangest of all, an assortment of what Dr. Messinger called ‘trade goods’ […] Dr. Messinger had arranged everything. It was he who chose the musical boxes and mechanical mice, the mirrors, combs, perfumery, pills, fish hooks, axe-heads, coloured rockets, and rolls of artificial silk, which were packed in the box of ‘trade goods.’

The “mechanical mice” are so perfectly inappropriate, but what I particularly liked in the above is the way that even something as ordinary as quotation marks — ‘trade goods’ — can introduce a note of irony when you know they’ve been deployed by a writer as keen-eyed as Waugh. A Handful of Dust is not Waugh’s finest book (his preferred ending — a jungle quest for the lost city of the Pie-wie — jars with the first two thirds; the shorter, alternate ending, written for the American serialization, is much better).

I was left grateful, though, that Waugh had not had the opportunity to turn his eye on my own decor, since I’m sure that I would have been skewered to the backboard without a moment’s hesitation. The office, for example, where I spend eight hours daily from my life’s dwindling horde:

protected from the inquisitive by an impedimenta of technical debris: shelves of unreferenced manuals describing essential and still unmastered software; snarled cables which were rumored to be capable of connecting one piece of obsolete hardware to another; a laser-printed diploma with official looking crest stating that the recipient had at one time “met the standards” of a minor college, a fact attested to (in an illegible scrawl) by a Dean who had retired in disgrace not long afterwards. In one corner squatted a cabinet marked “Official property of the University. Not to be removed” on which sat items selected to represent his more “informal” side: three artificial tulips in unnaturally bright colours; a bobblehead doll depicting the captain of a local sports team; and a porcelain toothbrush holder shaped like an outstretched hand, which he’d mounted vertically on a block of wood and labelled “Helping Hand,” an object which had been described, once, by a colleague at a previous place of employment, as “quite clever,” a fact which no one but he still remembered.