A Handful of Dust

Tony’s dependence on Mr. Todd illustrates how little value his elevated social status has outside the context that makes it meaningful. In the jungle, Tony is deprived of the wealth and privilege that he enjoyed in England. He has no servants, and his status as the owner and custodian of Hetton Abbey means nothing to the local people. What he can do is read—a skill that Todd lacks. In this small village in the Amazon, the English class system is meaningless, but the relationship between Tony and Todd quickly comes to resemble that between servant and master. Todd instructs Tony on what to do, taking advantage of Tony’s skills—and his dependence—for his own benefit. In England, Todd’s illiteracy would mark him as a member of the lower classes, but in this environment, an entirely different hierarchy is in place. Todd controls the guns, and so he is in charge, while Tony’s expensive education only makes him exploitable.

Todd puts Tony to work. As the weeks pass and Tony feels his chances of leaving the village begin to wane, he realizes that he is a prisoner in the small village. Tony’s fate is to live out the rest of his days in an environment where the privileges of the English class system are meaningless. The man who was made numb and alienated by his wealth and status has these stripped from him as he is forced to read for another man each night. The ultimate irony of Tony’s fate is the choice of reading material. Tony reads through the works of Charles Dickens, whose novels meticulously portrayed Social Hierarchy as a Source of Conflict between the various social classes in England. Held captive in this village, forced to work, made to narrate the class privileges he no longer enjoys, and still haunted by the mistakes of his past, Tony is stuck in a kind of purgatory.

While Tony is stuck in the jungle, life in England continues. Brenda slides into financial ruin, but she arrests her fate by marrying Jock Grant-Menzies. Of all the characters in the novel, Jock is the man most like Tony. He is a member of the same social class, the same clubs, and he shares many of Tony’s opinions. At times in the novel, they even repeat one another’s lines. While he does work, his job as a politician amounts to little more than raising a subject for political debate and then congratulating himself before a result is even achieved. By marrying Jock, Brenda risks the same alienation that ruined her first marriage. She did not enjoy being married to Tony and had an affair to instill excitement in her life. In a desperate situation, she marries Jock and subjects herself to the possibility of another loveless, unrewarding marriage, having decided that Inherited Privilege as a Source of Dissatisfaction is preferable to poverty. As Tony is trapped in the purgatory of the Amazonian village, Brenda is trapped in a marital purgatory, forced to relive her earlier mistakes with a man who closely resembles her first husband.

The short final part of the novel shows that life continues in England despite Tony’s absence. Tony’s cousins have inherited Hetton Abbey and are already talking about their plans for the house. The characters are stuck in the same patterns and cycles as Tony and Brenda, to the point that they decide that their cousin Tony—a cautionary tale—is to be celebrated and imitated. They want to treat the house exactly as Tony did, even though the house cost a fortune for Tony to run and severely impacted his financial situation. They have even erected a memorial to Tony (who is not dead) as a visual symbol of their desire to emulate their dead relative. Tony was not a particularly happy or successful man. His son died, his marriage fell apart, and he died (they believe) on a doomed trip into the jungle, yet his cousins want not only to honor him, but to copy him. This final gesture completes the novel’s satire of the emptiness of England’s social hierarchies. The destructive and malign aspects of Tony’s existence will not be addressed. Instead, the cycle continues, and life goes on.