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440 The twentieth century: 1900–45<br />

are cruelly exposed. A Handful of Dust (the title is a quotation from<br />

T.S. Eliot) is the story of the break-up of a marriage against the<br />

background of the dissolution of an ancient country estate. A contrast<br />

is established between a cynical and frivolous modern world and the<br />

gradual disappearance of a world of order and stability associated<br />

with an aristocratic past. Unlike Jane Austen or Henry Fielding, however,<br />

Waugh does not normally use irony and satire to judge or offer<br />

solutions, but presents the world as black comedy.<br />

THIRTIES NOVELISTS<br />

The three Powys brothers wrote several massive, complex and ambitious<br />

novels which achieved great critical regard, but never reached a wide<br />

readership. They used the West Country as a background and examined<br />

themes of vast scope in complex and controversial ways. John Cowper<br />

Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), and<br />

Weymouth Sands (1934) include the eternal struggle between good and<br />

evil and the legends associated with the West of England. T.F. Powys’s<br />

Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927) is an allegory of God’s coming to earth<br />

in an English village. This kind of personification is found throughout<br />

T.F. Powys’s work and is his way of handling the huge themes found in<br />

the works of all three brothers. Llewelyn Powys was perhaps the most<br />

prolific of the three. Impassioned City (1931) is his most all-encompassing<br />

account of humanity’s predicament and, like Love and Death (1939),<br />

confronts the extremes of experience in a way that brings together the<br />

concerns of Thomas Hardy with a vision close to that of Samuel Beckett:<br />

the whole imbued with the vast compass of reference to myth, religion,<br />

and cosmology, which identifies all the Powys brothers’ writing.<br />

Several writers looked forward rather than back in their novels,<br />

tackling new themes or experimenting with form in an innovative<br />

way. Christopher Isherwood, a friend of and collaborator with W.H.<br />

Auden, uses cinematic techniques in his Berlin novels Mr Norris<br />

Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The narrator<br />

says ‘I am a camera’ and proceeds to tell his stories with the kind of<br />

distanced objectivity a camera can lend. These novels remain valuable<br />

impressions of Germany at a crucial time in its history, and the lack of

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