“Sent down for indecent behavior”

Decline and Fall (PR6045 .A97 D4 1993), first published by Evelyn Waugh in 1928, is one of my favorite comic novels. The protagonist is Paul Pennyfeather, an earnest theology student at Oxford University, who has the bad fortune to get in the way of the annual meeting of a group of wealthy upper-class alumni. The upshot is that the drunken club members take Paul’s clothes, and so Paul must run naked through the college quadrangle. So naturally, Paul is expelled for indecent behavior and forced to take a job teaching classics, English, mathematics, French, German, and the pipe organ (though knowing nothing about German or the organ).

Fortunately for Lincoln College students, Llanabba Castle School is nothing like Lincoln. At Lincoln, for example, no student has gotten shot by an instructor, and the school butler—Lincoln doesn’t even have a school butler—isn’t pretending to be a member of Russian Royalty. Paul fights despair but eventually finds some pleasure in his work, even the organ-teaching part. He becomes engaged to the mother of one of his students. Sadly—well, sadly, a lot of things happen, and Paul ends up in prison, framed on human-trafficking charges. Will Paul get out of prison? Or will he end up murdered by a psychotic cell-mate? Will the student who was shot recover from his wounds? Is Paul's fiancée being faithful? These questions don’t sound like funny ones, but in the book, they really are.