How does the book end?
A couple of the comments above indicate the film ends differently form the book. Could someone let me know how the book ends cos I idn't like the end of the film and I wondered from what point the deviation occurred.
Since the book was published in 1930, World War II (the conflict depicted in the film) had not yet happened. However, Waugh creates an imaginary war, and Adam meets the drunk major in battle. The major hands over the money he owes, but it is now worthless, as the British economy has collapsed. (This final irony would be impossible to reconcile with Fry's decision to use the real war, since the British economy actually perked up between 1939 and 1945, only slumping afterwards.) The two of them (Adam and the major) sit in the jeep with a couple of young women, and listen to the sounds of war. The end.
The sort-of happy ending, with Adam paying for Ginger to disappear, is not in the novel.
I don't know why Fry did this - I have deep suspicions that a "focus group" or "audience testing" may have been involved.
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Waugh wasn't "predicting" a war as such. It just seemed to flow naturally from the anarchic disaster area that his characters had made of Britain.
Two biographical aspects. 1) Waugh was born in 1903, and was thus slightly too young to have fought in WWI. This bred a sort of survivors guilt in him and his generation.
2) While writing Vile Bodies, he discovered his wife was having an affair. Some have argued that this threw him into a paroxysm of disgust at the collapse of morality, and he hurled his characters into a fictional war as a sort of punishment. The depsir into which he fell led to his conversion to Catholicism. See his novel A Handful of Dust, or the movie adaptation of same, for a fictionalised version of the affir and its aftermath (Waugh = Tony Last in the book).