Vile Bodies [SEP] narrative location
Vile Bodies
Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the bright young things: decadent young London society after World War I.
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
are little noticeable in the gay stream of Mrs Christie's narrative. Perhaps I should not have noticed them had I not read the book so quickly that, in a secluded village, there was nothing for it next day but to read it again with a sterner eye but no less enjoyment."
Robert Barnard wrote of the book in 1980 that it was "Lively, with occasional glimpses of a "Vile Bodies" world, though one short on Waugh's anarchic humour and long on snobbery ('Nobody looks at