North America and Africa, their past, present and future, and key to the Negro problem

Like Margot Metroland in Decline and fall, Julia Stitch in Scoop, and Virginia Crouchback in The Sword of Honor, Mrs. Rattery is one of Waugh's goddesses of modernity; her spirit presides over A Handful of Dust in much the same way these others reign in their respective narratives. She is what George Orwell called streamlined, a person who has dispatched the nostalgic accessories of the past and abandoned the needless bother of an interior life as if they were so much excess baggage. Asked her opinion of the Last estate, she replies that she never notices houses one way or the other. Houses, ancestral houses at least, establish a link from one generation to the next, but Mrs. Rattery simply does not value the continuity they represent. She is supremely indifferent to the conventional concerns people have for their past and future. Mrs. Rattery's existence is radically present tense. As such she is ideally suited for survival in the contemporary urban scene. Waugh gives her what seems to be his grudging admiration ...»