Decline and Fall

 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh 293 pp.

Paul Pennyfeather gets expelled from his Oxford college through no fault of his own but that didn't matter to the powers that be. He ends up taking a teaching position at a boys boarding school with no experience in the teaching field, one being a chronic liar. That doesn't matter because no one else working there is any better at it than Pennyfeather is. The school is a marvelous parody of British public schools (what we call private). The antics of the staff rival the antics of the students, rowdy and mostly harmless, except in the case of young Tangent, whose minor injury during games day grows gangrenous and ultimately deadly. Pennyfeather becomes entangled with Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, the widowed mother of one of the students. On the day of their wedding, while attempting to fix a business problem for his future wife, Pennyfeather is arrested. His conviction lands him a five year sentence in prison. Other of the teachers at the school have similar bad ends, including suicide, a conviction for bigamy, and various financial misfortunes. Although Pennyfeather eventually comes out okay the ending is left open to wonder what else can befall him as he studies to become a minister. This is Waugh's first published novel and is a wonderful satire of parts of British society in the 1920s.