The most explicit condemnation comes, peculiarly, from a race car driver Miles Malpractice is going with, who hollers something like, "What's wrong with you people?!" The movie doesn't make clear his source of moral authority and then drops him from the picture. In the scene in the book the driver "heartlessly" shows more concern about his car than about Agatha Runcible, who's driven off in it and disappeared. (Why have we been given this speech, which, in the characters' parlance, is truly "bogus," and not the slapstick involving Agatha's smoking in the pits?)

But the most staggering switch-up comes in the handling of the homosexual Miles. The movie's Miles, a snotty, ferret-faced drug addict, is flagrant in a way he isn't in the book, and yet when he has to leave the country because of his homosexuality Fry stops everything for a tearful scene clearly meant to elicit our sympathy. It makes no sense: the movie has, if anything, made Miles even more representative of his hellish circle, undercutting any reason for us to care especially what happens to him. (In the book Miles's fate is summed up in two unemphatically informative lines between Adam and Nina.) This ill-fitting Wilde remnant is an obvious piece of self-serving special pleading on the part of the openly gay Fry, and it grinds the story's gears to filings.

The huge cast of characters in the book whirl by in a blur and register like an infinite string of zeroes with no positive integer at their head. Waugh shows no affection for any of them, no investment in any individual's fate. There's every reason to sympathize with actual victims of oppressive sexuality laws, but these aren't real people. They're not even realistically drawn characters. They're appealing because they're so totally, amusingly, flatly irredeemable.

The book is not for simps who think a work should give you a reason to care about, root for, or like the characters. This is related to the fact that it's not a novel in any sense except the least meaningful (as a work of prose fiction of a certain length). It's prose satire and so thoroughgoingly satiric it scarcely contains what could be a called a satiric norm, i.e., a standard, explicit or implicit, by reference to which the targets of the satire could ameliorate their behavior. We can infer a norm by negative implication but that's very different from having anything invested in the characters' fates.

By contrast, in Nashville Altman respects his central figure Barbara Jean as an artist in the midst of all the empty activity, and the Godfather movies are tragic by virtue of making clear to us what Michael might have been if he hadn't got involved in the family operations. Both movies have a more palpable, passionate sense of this world as fallen, of experience as a decidedly mixed proposition, than Vile Bodies. Waugh's tone in the book is perfectly, glacially consistent. Fry's movie varies the tone, fumblingly, and comes to seem like a bad adaptation of Anthony Powell rather than a bad adaptation of Waugh. Powell is a greater writer than Waugh but this doesn't rate as a feat.