Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited is without doubt the glorious English prose at its fullest; it envelops and transforms you with its complexity, like the embrace of a once mighty ocean now resigned to its violent decay. At the center of this violent decay are the Flytes, an aristocratic family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead; with whose dysfunction and romances, the protagonist's (i.e Charles Ryder's) fortunes are inextricably wound up right from his days at Oxford, where he meets Sebastian Flyte and his coterie of fashionable young men, thereby laying the foundations of relationship that defies easy categorization- because beyond its obvious homosexual insinuations, there is a surreal romantic male friendship at the heart of this cultural mosaic. Looming large over the litany of spiritual dysfunction among Flytes, is of course Catholic theology, which is omnipresent in a story precisely in the strange moments when we least expect it to be. Is Brideshead unabashed, unreserved nostalgia for an age of gentle nobility, its myths and social values that it sees slipping away or is it the an honest obituary for the lost prose of cultural delight? The answer, like everything else in Brideshead is complicated.