Vile Bodies (1930) has been re-issued by Penguin in a beautiful edition to mark Evelyn Waugh's centenary. Brighton Beach Book Group were asked to review the book bearing in mind the rumour that the character of Nina Blount was based on Diana Mosley who died recently.

Inspired by a party the couple gave, Waugh dedicated the book to Diana and her first husband, Bryan Guinness. As a young woman Diana, third of the Mitford girls, was attended by a court of young men, including Evelyn Waugh who declared "her beauty ran through the room like a peal of bells". In 1932 at a summer ball in her Chelsea house Diana danced until dawn "in all the diamonds I could lay hands on". That night Oswald Mosley declared his love; Diana, intrigued by his political ideas and madly in love, left her rich young husband and later married Mosley.

In Vile Bodies Nina Blount, a young society beauty, also loves attending parties, it is what her set do (...masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, 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...) As for political ideas and love, these themes do not seem to interest Evelyn Waugh so Nina expresses no ideas or capacity for love.

Vile Bodies does feature the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Outrage and his cabinet but they do not their ideas; they are completely out of control as the country hurtles towards war.

In terms of plot Vile Bodies is a love story but Nina and Adam share none of the passion Diana Mosley felt for Oswald. Vile Bodies is a satire of London's smart set, a class doomed to be blown apart by the coming war, and Waugh pays tribute to the frippery of this society whilst at the same time relentlessly uncovering it's hypocrisy with his acid wit.

Waugh said of his work:' I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.' Many of us read books to learn about what it is to be human and as a group we found it difficult to look with any sympathy at this novel, in which Waugh rejects any investigation of psychology or character. We found some of the devices quite irritating e.g. when Adam's autobiography is seized at Customs and burnt so that the protagonist is penniless for the purpose of the plot. In this scene Waugh, a staunch Tory, shows his wilful ignorance of the working-class.

We tried to imagine what had made the book so popular and were reminded that Kandinsky complained that he couldn't make out Monet's haystacks because of all the brush marks, something that we can't imagine now, so perhaps we should bear in mind that the book was written over seventy years ago and perhaps people loved the humour. Also, the book does bring the Jazz Age to life - there is a lot that is brand new for the time - fast cars, modern steamships, aeroplane travel and sexual experiment, which is written about surprisingly frankly for the time.

We laughed at the way Ginger confronted Adam so ineffectually about sleeping with Nina and this led to a discussion about sexual morality. One member reported how a friend of hers had been left by her husband for another woman in a school-gate romance. The abandoned woman bemoaned the fact that all their friends adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards the errant couple and felt that 'there should be more judgement; this is what we lack today'. But although in the book their contemporaries do not judge the vile bodies, Waugh invites the reader to judge them. Although the tone of the novel is mainly light and superficial there are several dark scenes; the original Mr Chatterbox gassing himself, the prostitute dying at Lottie's while swinging on a chandelier and the subsequent pr cover-up. In a typically surreal scene Waugh exposes the ridiculous immorality of war, we leave Adam with the Drunk Major, now General, and a fallen angel quaffing champagne in a Daimler on the battlefield with the sound of fighting raging around them.

When concentrating on the upper echelons of society Waugh shows himself to be a keen observer and we all enjoyed the relationship between the Colonel and the Rector; the scenes in which the Colonel appropriates the Rector's car, and later his electricity, were very funny. As a joke, rather than a character the Colonel greatly amused us. There were several other good jokes we all appreciated e.g. Lady Circumference standing up to the evangelist, Mrs Melrose Ape snorting 'What a damned impudent woman'. Sometimes we found the humour too public-schoolboy, in particular the names Waugh relentlessly gives to the characters, although we did like the angels names, Humility, Charity, Prudence, Divine Discontent, Mercy, Justice and Creative Endeavour.

This book generated a lot of group discussion. We all enjoyed the bogus Mr Chatterbox columns, the promotion of suede shoes, green bowler hats, bogus fashionable hang-outs like the temperance hotel and the station kiosk, even bogus people. We discussed other fake people - topical right now with the publication of Peter Carey's 'My Life as a Fake'. Benjamin Wilkowsky, who wrote a book about his experience as a young child in a concentration camp, convincing his readers that he had been adopted by a Swiss family and banned from talking about it, turned out to be bogus. There were also two famous cases of aboriginal artists in Australia who turned out to be a white Australian and a whole community respectively. Another case was Van Meergan who faked Vermeer paintings. When he admitted to faking the paintings, describing how he'd achieved the results Dr Bredius, who had authenticated the paintings as Vermeer's, killed himself.

The discussion led to biography as a genre; one member described as fantastically moving the biography of Anne Frank. Another member hates flying and finds that a good biography with lots of scandal to keep you turning the pages helps him through the ordeal. The biography of the despicable Chet Baker fit the bill this summer.

Whether or not this was a biography of Diana Mosley, it provoked another interesting discussion. Nina could be partly based on a young Diana; when talking about the Jews Diana is reported to have said 'maybe they could have gone somewhere like Uganda - very empty and lovely climate'. That awful sentiment seems typical of the Jazz Age described in Vile Bodies.