Empty hearts
Sunday night. The kids were out. The First-Born was in Germany, The Daughter was in Brighton and The Last Son Of Krypton was in some picturehouse somewhere. In search of cultural nourishment, Wee Wifey and I decided to watch the movie adaption of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel A Handful Of Dust.
I’d studied the book at grammar school, where we’d spend lesson after lesson analysing the contents of almost every page. So as Wee Wifey and I watched the film version, much of the plot seemed to ring distant bells. I’d half forgotten that gnawing emptiness which slowly creeps over you, as you realise that - despite their apparent wealth - the inhabitants of Waugh’s universe are desperately poor.
SPIRITUAL REFUGE
When I first encountered Waugh, I was an acne-ridden teenager trying to make sense of my own world. Brought up in a Catholic-Protestant home, against the backdrop of a northern industrial landscape, I was about as far removed as possible from the chattering classes of A Handful Of Dust. But I got the message.
We’d also studied T S Eliot, whose work had inspired this novel – the title is a phrase from The Waste Land. I actually found something of a spiritual refuge in the writings of Waugh and Eliot. Waugh had converted to Catholicism, Eliot to Anglicanism. Both men had torn in two the curtain that covered the hearts of those with influence and affluence. The void they revealed was frightening.
The story centres around Tony and Brenda Last (the last of their kind?), who rattle in the cavernous space of a massive, rambling mansion. The rooms are named after characters from Arthurian myth, as if the couple are trying to mask their shallow lives with the depth of a medieval romance.
GREASY TOFF
Lady Brenda (Kristin Scott Thomas) has had enough of their Gothic existence, and has an affair with greasy toff John Beaver (Rupert Graves). Their shaky marriage finally collapses when the Lasts’ son John Andrew is killed in a hunting accident. Brenda rots in the mire of her own making, while Tony (James Wilby) is held captive by a Charles Dickens fan (Obi-Wan Kenobi) in the Brazilian jungle.
The movie captures some of the novel’s comedy, though not all of it. However, it does convey the crippling inner hopelessness of London’s petite noblesse. When I was studying Waugh, the soundtrack of our teenage culture seemed eerily relevant, as The Stranglers lamented ‘no more heroes anymore’ and the Sex Pistols declared, ‘there is no future in England’s dreamland’. We must’ve all been reading the same books.
