Recommendations
Books Like Decline and Fall
What to read after Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928) is one of the funniest debut novels in English fiction — Paul Pennyfeather's absurd journey through a Welsh prep school, the English aristocracy, and prison, narrated with total comic detachment. If you were drawn to its satirical energy and its portrait of English eccentricity, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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Vile Bodies
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's second novel and the natural companion to Decline and Fall — Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount in Bright Young Things London; the satire is darker and the social world more precisely observed; the two novels together form a portrait of England in the late 1920s as seen by its youngest and most fashionable inhabitants, and are best read in order
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A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
Tony Last, whose Edwardian country house world is destroyed by his faithless wife — the point at which Waugh's comedy turns tragic; still very funny in parts but ending in something devastating; the natural third step after Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, showing the full arc of Waugh's early career
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Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Jim Dixon's disastrous year at a provincial university — the most important heir to Waugh's comic tradition in postwar English fiction; where Waugh satirizes the upper class from the perspective of the upper class, Amis satirizes it from the perspective of the lower-middle class trying to penetrate it; the two together show the range of English comic fiction in the twentieth century
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The Code of the Woosters
by P.G. Wodehouse
Bertie Wooster and Jeeves — the other great English comic tradition of the same period; where Waugh uses comic situations to satirize, Wodehouse uses them to create pure pleasure; both are set in the English upper class of the 1920s and 30s, and both are extraordinarily well-written; The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the best of the Wooster novels
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Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
William Boot, a nature columnist accidentally sent as a foreign correspondent to a fictional African war — Waugh's most purely farcical later novel and the sharpest satire of Fleet Street and foreign correspondence; slightly darker than Decline and Fall but in the same comic tradition; based on Waugh's own experience as a war correspondent in Abyssinia
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Officers and Gentlemen
by Evelyn Waugh
The middle volume of Waugh's wartime Sword of Honour trilogy (after Men at Arms) — the best of the trilogy and the most direct bridge between Waugh's early comic novels and his late Catholic fiction; Guy Crouchback's experience in the Cretan campaign of 1941; the comedy of Decline and Fall is still present but it has been transfigured by something darker and sadder
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Three Men in a Boat
by Jerome K. Jerome
Three friends and a dog on a boating holiday on the Thames — the great Victorian comic novel that most directly anticipates Waugh's deadpan narrative style; published in 1889, nearly forty years before Decline and Fall, it shows the English comic tradition that Waugh is working within; still extremely funny and the best companion read to Waugh's early novels
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
The novel in which Waugh becomes fully the Catholic elegist — completely different in tone from Decline and Fall (elegiac rather than farcical) but showing the same social world and the same England through a very different lens; the best evidence of how far Waugh traveled as a novelist and the necessary destination after reading his early work
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