Resumo de Decline And Fall

Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. 1928.

Take the comic Dickens, stir in the absurd Wilde, and add them to the anti-sentimental Waugh. Then you get Decline and Fall, a novel not of the Roman Empire but of Paul Pennyfeather, an obscure ministerial student in the 1920?s at Scone College, Oxford, who, through an encounter with a drunken member of an aristocratic club, loses his pants and thus his college position.

Having been dismissed for indecent conduct, he follows custom and starts teaching at a boys? school?in this case, Dr. Fagan?s abysmal Llanabba Castle in Wales, where the dandified butler, Philbrick, creates various colorful pasts for himself and where Paul?s colleagues comprise both hard-drinking, suicide-faking Captain Grimes and wig-wearing Mr. Prendergast, a clergyman driven from his pulpit by doubt. Among other duties, Paul tutors young Peter Beste-Chetwynde at the organ, an instrument on which Paul?s complete incompetence is no hindrance to Peter?s playing Pop Goes the Weasel. After a field day Dr. Fagan holds to impress the students? parents, especially Lady Circumference, the school rapidly declines and falls, in part because Mr. Prendergast shoots Lady Circumference?s son in the foot with a real firearm used as a starter?s pistol and, after an amputation, the boy eventually dies. A dispute among parents as to the number of laps young Clutterbuck has run in the three-mile race does not enhance general parental satisfaction either.

But Paul never returns from the Easter vacation, during which he has visited the widowed Margot Beste-Chetwynde at her estate, King?s Thursday, the site of an ultramodern house that has replaced one from the Tudor dynasty. She falls in love, or lust, with Paul, and appears to be on the verge of marrying him amid immense public attention when he is arrested for his ingenuous involvement in the Latin American Entertainment Company, Limited, which is really Margot?s string of brothels in South America. Too chivalric to bring up his betrothed?s name in his trial, Paul goes to jail, where he re-encounters Mr. Prendergast, now a chaplain who has returned to the Anglican priesthood because, he has learned, his doubts do not block his being a modern clergyman. Unfortunately for Mr. Prendergast, Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, the Governor of Blackstone Gaol, is such a prison reformer that he gives an insane fundamentalist carpenter the tools used to remove Mr. Prendergast?s head. Paul is soon transferred to a labor camp on Egdon Heath, where he again meets Captain Grimes, imprisoned for bigamy (his first wife being one of Margot?s newly hired prostitutes and his second wife being Dr. Fagan?s older daughter). Grimes escapes by galloping away on a guard?s horse, and Paul, thanks to the efforts of the not-entirely-heartless Margot, finds himself taken away for an unneeded appendectomy, legally declared dead without even undergoing surgery, and shipped in good health to Margot?s villa on Corfu.

Soon Paul, disguised by a mustache, is back studying at Scone College, unrecognized as the man dismissed for indecency and known from his past life only to his fellow student Peter, now a hard-drinking earl. Margot has married old Sir Humphrey Maltravers, the Home Secretary, and has retained young Sir Alistair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington for her pleasure. As the novel ends, Paul goes to bed, at peace as an observer in a ridiculous world.

Resumos Relacionados