“‘Sent down for indecent behaviour, eh?’ said Paul Pennyfeather’s guardian.”
This is Evelyn Waugh’s first real novel, and is a revision of an earlier novel he was working on. It was published in 1928, and if you’ve only read something like Brideshead Revisited or to some extend Men at Arms (or the whole of the Sword of Honour trilogy) it’s easy to mistake the humor and irony of those more serious novels for the primary tone of much of Waugh’s fiction. Several of his books are distinctly farce in their approach, and he starts that off here. It’s almost like a PG Wodehouse novel in a lot of ways, but much more sardonic and cynical in its outlook.
Paul Pennyfeather is a student of theology until he’s not. Specifically, he’s asked to leave under somewhat abrupt circumstances, and like many grad students out in the world for the first time, he really has no idea what to do with himself. He secures a job teaching at a public school soon enough, and while there he’s told he must also coach the cricket team. Not being an athlete at all and never having really been a teacher, he finds a way to manage both. He specifically comes up with a system for never being too rough on the boys including assigning them much work or holding them very accountable, if they’ll promise not to be too rough on him either. It works; it’s a classic system.
Eventually he also works as a private tutor for boys in the school and ends up falling in love with one of his pupils’ mother, a countess who lives primarily in Italy. They become in engaged, and the second half of the novel takes place in Italy among other locations. He finds out eventually that her money comes from running brothels in South America, and to his dismay, he’s not her only fiance really. All these things must be sorted out, and because it’s a comedy, do get sorted out eventually.