Vile Bodies

Title

The original title was to be Bright Young Things, which went on to be that of Stephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation. Waugh changed it because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that he eventually settled on also appears in a comment made by the novel's narrator in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...",

Style

Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's second and most ostentatiously "modern" novel. Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator. Waugh claims it was the first novel in which much of the dialogue takes place on the telephone.

The book was dedicated to B. G. and D. G. (Bryan and Diana Guinness).

Summary

Adam Fenwick-Symes is the novel's antihero; 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 founders. At the book's end, we find Adam alone on an apocalyptic European battlefield. The book shifts in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book's composition). Others have defended the novel's curious ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.

Influence

David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence on his composition of the song "Aladdin Sane".

A stage adaptation of Vile Bodies, endorsed by the Evelyn Waugh estate, was staged at the Warwick Arts Centre in March 2012.

Characters