Explaining the Title
The novel is a satire on the decadence which befell London in the wake of the end of the World War I. Behavior by young Edwardians who seemed to have as little respect for traditions and conventions as they did for masking inhibitions is linked primarily with wild partying. Parties becomes the central symbol of the societal decadence and this is made abundantly clear in one image-laden paragraph in which the lack of punctuation mirrors the breathlessness of the generation’s movement from fad to fad:
“Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties...parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris--all that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies”
Non-Satirical Description
One of the parties so described does, in fact, take place upon a ship. Loosening the reins of satire for a brief moment, the author reveals his talent for imagery extends beyond producing humor to work as an element of pure literary description:
“Sometimes the ship pitched and sometimes she rolled and sometimes she stood quite still and shivered all over, poised above an abyss of dark water; then she would go swooping down like a scenic railway train into a windless hollow and up again with a rush into the gale; sometimes she would burrow her path, with convulsive nosings and scramblings like a terrier in a rabbit hole; and sometimes she would drop dead like a lift. It was this last movement that caused the most havoc among the passengers.”
The Future Prime Minister
The political aspect of the novel’s satirical jabs is unexpectedly introduced by way of imagery that is far removed from any political association. But then that distance between the man and his duties later becomes the point of the satire. The intense focus and precision of description of the man in the coma makes clear his obsessions lie far away from matters of state:
“The Leader of His Majesty's Opposition lay sunk in a rather glorious coma, made splendid by dreams of Oriental imagery--of painted paper houses; of golden dragons and gardens of almond blossom; of golden limbs and almond eyes, humble and caressing; of very small golden feet among almond blossoms; of little painted cups full of golden tea; of a golden voice singing behind a painted paper screen; of humble, caressing little golden hands and eyes shaped like almonds and the colour of night.”
Dinner without Dining
The novel’s protagonist, Adam, is caught in one of the novel’s rare moments of honest self-reflection and it is a testament to the quirkiness of the characterization that this snapshot of thought concerned with a fantasy of enjoying meals without actually eating is nowhere near the weirdest thing in the story:
“No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells…if only one could live…on the savour of burnt offerings. He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy”
