Tony Last is an English country squire, who, having seen his illusions shattered one by one, joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle, only to find himself trapped in a remote outpost as the prisoner of a maniac.

Tony Last is a country gentleman living with his wife, Brenda, and their eight-year-old son, John Andrew, at Hetton Abbey, their ancestral home.

She then starts spending her weeks in London, and persuades Tony to finance a small flat, which she rents from Mrs. Beaver, John's mother, who is a canny businesswoman.

On the outward journey, Tony has a shipboard romance with Thérèse de Vitré, a young girl whose Roman Catholicism causes her to shun him when he admits he is married.

[2] He worked briefly as a Daily Express reporter,[3] and wrote a short biography of the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti before achieving success in 1928 with the publication of his comic novel, Decline and Fall.

His professional successes coincided with private upheavals; in June 1928 he married Evelyn Gardner, but just over a year later the marriage ended when she declared her love for the couple's mutual friend John Heygate.

[5] He had fallen in love with Teresa Jungman, a lively socialite whose Catholicism precluded any intimacy in their relationship since in the eyes of the Church Waugh remained married.

His decision to absent himself may have been a reaction to his increasingly complicated emotional life; while his passion for Teresa Jungman remained unrequited, he was involved in various unsatisfactory casual sexual liaisons, and was himself being pursued by the much older Hazel Lavery.

[21][22][n 1] Apart from using different names and some minor details, this 1933 story is the same as the episode that Waugh used the next year as chapter VI, "Du Côté de Chez Todd", of A Handful of Dust: an elderly settler (modelled in manner, speech and appearance on Christie), rescues and holds captive a lost explorer and requires him, if he wishes to eat, to read aloud the novels of Dickens, in perpetuity.

[31] In January he wrote to Mary Lygon, reporting that he had written 18,500 words of "my filthy novel",[32] and later he told Katharine Asquith: "I have just killed a little boy at a lawn meet & made his mother commit adultery ... so perhaps you won't like it after all".

The line is within the section of the poem entitled "The Burial of the Dead", which depicts a comfortless, lifeless land of desert and rubble, reflecting the empty moral ambience of the novel.

[34] The critic Cyril Connolly, whose first reaction to the work had been negative, later called it "the only book which understands the true horror of the withdrawal of affection in an affair from [the point of view of] the innocent party".

[50] Thérèse de Vitré, the object of Tony's forlorn attempt at a shipboard romance, was named "Bernadette" in the original manuscript; the change was made as a reference to Waugh's platonic friend Teresa Jungman.

Philip Toynbee describes it as a turning point in Waugh's journey from outright satire to disillusioned realism: "Much of this book is in the old manner, funny-preposterous laced with funny-bitter, but the whole tone and atmosphere are violently changed when the little boy is killed".

Although, says Cunningham, "[i]t provokes as much knowing laughter as Waugh's other satires of manners", it is a significant step away from its predecessors, towards the Catholic "comedies of redemption" that would become the principal focus of his writing life.

[57] In his introduction to the 1997 Penguin edition, Robert Murray Davis suggests that in part, the book reflected Waugh's reconsideration of his position as a Catholic writer, in the light of the recent Oldmeadow furore over Black Mischief.

[58] He may have developed a more serious tone to pre-empt further criticism from that quarter, although Stannard maintains that Waugh's beginnings as a serious writer date back to 1929, when he was completing Vile Bodies.

[29] William Plomer, writing in The Spectator after the book's first publication, thought it mistaken "to regard Mr Waugh's more surprising situations as farcical or far-fetched; they are on the whole extremely realistic".

[57] In keeping with Waugh's dismissive attitude to the Church of England, Anglicanism is shown as a farce (Mr Tendril the vicar's sermons),[26] or a nullity (Tony's admission that he had never really thought much about God).

[57][63] Instead, Christianity is evoked by presenting the awfulness of life without it; according to the writer and critic Frank Kermode, "[T]he callousness of incident and the coldness of tone work by suggesting the positive and rational declaration of the Faith".

[65] John Raymond in the New Statesman refers to Waugh's "unique type of moral vision", and calls the novel a "powerful twentieth century sermon on the breakdown of a Christian marriage".

[73][74] Later, Tony finds purpose in his otherwise pointless voyage when he hears of the fabled lost city from Messinger; he visualises it as Gothic in character, "a transfigured Hetton ... everything luminous and translucent; a coral citadel crowning a green hill top sown with daisies".

[75] When at the end of his quest he first catches sight of Todd's settlement, in his delirium he sees, instead of the reality of mud huts and desolation, "gilded cupolas and spires of alabaster".

[79] Thus, Tony's devotion is shown to be to a false ideal; his deposition and replacement in his domain by middle-class heirs represents what the writer Brigid Brophy terms "a bourgeois sack of a fake-Gothic Rome".

[88] Peter Quennell in the New Statesman found the story both painful and amusing—"tragedy and comedy are interdependent"—but was not overcome by the bouts of hilarity that had interrupted his reading of earlier novels such as Decline and Fall.

[89] Plomer's Spectator review described the book as "another of [Waugh's] cultivated pearls", economically written, holding the reader's attention throughout and capturing with precision the moods and rhythms of life as it was lived in certain quarters of society.

His friend, the journalist Tom Driberg agreed to place a notice in his "William Hickey" column in the Daily Express, in which Waugh accepted fully Oldmeadow's right to criticise the literary quality of the work "in any terms he thinks suitable".

[91] Many of Waugh's friends and admirers gave the book unstinting praise, among them Rebecca West, Lady Diana Cooper, Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc.

Among those less enthusiastic were the novelist J.B. Priestley, who found the characters lightweight and uninvolving, and the devoutly Catholic Katharine Asquith who thought the writing was brilliant but the subject-matter deeply depressing.

[97] A film version, directed by Charles Sturridge, was released in 1988, with James Wilby as Tony, Kristin Scott Thomas as Brenda, Judi Dench as Mrs Beaver and Alec Guinness as Mr Todd.