Declino E Caduta by Evelyn Waugh

A biting comic satire follows a guileless young Oxford man who, after being unjustly implicated in a scandal, drifts into a dead‑end job at a second‑rate boarding school and becomes entangled with a cast of selfish, opportunistic social climbers and a glamorous but morally dubious woman; his earnestness collides with hypocrisy and corruption in interwar British society, leading to a series of absurd misadventures, wrongful imprisonment, and a bleakly humorous critique of decaying institutions and manners.