This was Evelyn Waugh's fourth novel and seventh book, and was published when he was thirty. Despite being a self-professed slacker, Waugh obviously was anything but. A Handful of Dust is generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early period, when he wrote some of the funniest, most stylish and savage satires on modern manners and mores. Certainly, this is a masterpiece of stylish satire, and is funny, too, in Waugh's characteristically grisly way, but as a work of art it is seriously flawed by the inclusion of the long sections set in South America, where the hapless protagonist, Tony Last, is trapped in the jungle and forced to read Dickens endlessly to a madman, "a `conceit' in the Webster manner," as the author himself admitted. The tone in these long passages jars - fatally, according to some commentators, including P.G. Wodehouse and Henry Green - against the malignant glitter of the earlier settings in London and rural England, the antechambers to Tony's tropical hell. Who will ever forget the bleakness of the scene in which Tony's son, John, is killed in a riding accident and his unfaithful wife Brenda, fearing it's her lover who's been killed, first is horrified and then, learning it is her child who has died, murmurs "Oh thank God." A marvellous book, and a harbinger of the many marvels that were to come, though the footnotes scattered throughout the text are often more a distraction than a help.