Vile Bodies is the second novel by Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books, and a prolific journalist and book reviewer. It satirises London’s post–First World War “bright young things” — a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in London — and the press coverage around them. Waugh originally considered the title Bright Young Things but changed it; the published title echoes a narrator’s remark on crowds and parties: “Those vile bodies”.
The novel follows a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, who hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Waugh’s acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.
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). Critics have noted the novel’s fragmented scenes, jump-cuts, and telephone dialogue, often linking its method to cinema and to modernist effects. Some have defended the novel’s downbeat ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.
David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence in writing his song “Aladdin Sane”, and a film adaptation, written and directed by Stephen Fry, was released in 2003. (Wikipedia)
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