The Making of a Clergyman??

Last night I finished the novel, Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. It was a sharp and witty encounter with the privileges of the rich. Waugh struck right into the core of how vulgar and common people can be at heart, despite the glamour of names and titles.  He exposes the genuine and the crooked, the naïve and the crafty. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, is an ordinary young man, a theology student – but things happen to him, and he adjusts to the situations of injustice, luck and leniency, love and imprisonment, to mention some. I sense a strong support for the ordinary, well behaved man, and a rather sharp criticism of the upper class mentality, but perhaps more so: the way the British society has succumbed to class-conscious power structure and the whims of the eccentric. In the end Pennyfeather takes up his studies theology again and prepares to become a clergyman.

I have decided to read this book with my senior class at school. We are a rich and privileged bunch, comfortably tucked away on the countryside in a private boarding school. Pennyfeather was both a student and a teacher at private boarding schools… ha, ha… in England they were all-boys’ schools, naturally, but I would love to relate Waugh’s wit and perception of England in the 1920ties to our own self-perception.

            We have delightful students, serious politicians and priests in the making, and we have unsuspecting, unpretentious young people, who will make their imprint on this world for sure. I think they should meet Mr. Paul Pennyfeather ;)

I feel delightfully mischievous today, being a senior teacher at this establishment. Perhaps I am too easily influenced by what I read – oh, no, not me! I have been trained in ‘critical thinking’, and no eccentric whims must take hold of me.