Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh is the only writer I can think of whose career progresses away from cynicism rather than towards it, he seems to get progressively less disillusioned as his career goes on. This, his first novel, is unflinchingly bitter and so satirical to be wonderfully absurd. The outrageous names (of various characters that reappear in later novels) are something out of a seventeenth-century play. The terse, detached style can only be compared to a very stiff drink of vodka. However, I really did miss the moments of sincere emotion that occur in Waugh's other novels, and are all the more impactful in contrast to the hard cynicism. But the atmosphere of a bizarre, terrifyingly upended, nonsense world that operates by its own dreadful logic was really gripping and sort of wonderfully horrifying. I generally felt petrified with awe and hypnotised into admiration at the eerily elegant style and mercilessness with which Waugh treats his characters.