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Filled with rage and outrage, Waugh in his middle 20s gave tongue to his disgust in Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). The world these books describe is the world Eliot called the waste land and Yeats described as a "mere anarchy" in which "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Waugh's people are the Bright Young Things of London's high society, people who ride to hounds while the world is going to the dogs. Waugh loathes them because they have betrayed the aristocratic ethos, and he depicts the society they dominate as a moral chaos, a twittering world in which bored women leave their husbands for men they do not even like, mothers regret the death of children only because mourning limits social life, and convicts given tools to stimulate their creativity employ them to decapitate the chaplain.
His touch in these books is as light as Ronald Firbank's, but unlike that airy Edwardian, Waugh displays feelings that are as savage as Swift's; and in Black Mischief (1932), a hilarious and still timely tale of emerging Africa and declining England, his feelings find blackly humorous expression: the British hero, inquiring after his British sweetheart in an African town, is cheerfully informed that she was the principal ingredient in the stew he has just eaten.
During his 20s, Waugh's comedy was vividly physical; in his 30s, it grew rapidly more metaphysical. In A Handful of Dust, for example, he turns entirely inward and laughs at himself. He personifies himself as a hero so taken with the past that he cannot cope with the present, and then witheringly satirizes his character and his art in the famous climax—a passage in which the hero realizes in horror the futility to which his passion for the past has condemned him. He must spend the rest of his life in a jungle clearing, reading Dickens over and over and over to a madman.
The idea of a dead end, seldom in all literature so powerfully expressed, dominated Waugh's experience in this period. Sickened by the chaos of the '20s, banished from the order of his childhood, he felt desperately the need of a new center to turn on, and he found it in Catholicism. Waugh was converted in 1930, and this experience, followed by the great adventure of World War II, altogether altered his art.
Waugh was deepened by his religion, and the deepening was steeply apparent in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a lyric celebration of Catholicism that alternates pious puling with the loveliest cadences he ever came upon. He was broadened by the war, and the broadening was vigorously displayed in his masterpiece, a 972-page trilogy (Men at Anns, Officers and Gentlemen, The End of the Battle) which is now widely considered the best British novel of World War II. In the trilogy Waugh creates in Apthorpe his greatest comic character, a Falstaff as funny, as tragic, as human as the huge original; but what matters more is that here for the first time the author accommodates in a single opus all the dominant elements of his life and art: satire, language, religion, sense of tradition, instinct for milieu. The consummation is a social history of the war that in wisdom and spaciousness and easy irony rivals and resembles the work of Trollope.