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.

This novel is one of those I'd heard of over the years, and was aware of the various adaptations and so on but never got around to exploring it. It felt like one of those you should look into if you are interested in British literature, so I decided to tackle it. The story takes place between the two world wars and shows the degeneration of an aristocratic family, who are slowly losing their money, prestige, and so on.

Captain Charles Ryder, during WWII, gets stationed near the Marchmain house, family estate of his old friend Sebastian Flyte. The book is his memories of his time with Sebastian and the rest of his family, Lord and Lady Marchmain, and their children.

Charles meets Sebastian Flyte in college, where they get very close. However, when Sebastian first introduces Charles to his family home, he has some issues with them, avoiding introducing Charles, at least at first. The family is Catholic; Lady Marchmain in particular, insists her children to be as tied to their faith as she is. Charles himself is ordinary, middle class, with enough money for college and no strong religious ties or feelings.

Charles and Sebastian, I assume, are romantic or sexually involved, though it is never clearly said. Sebastian develops a drinking problem, and Charles is stuck between him and his family as they expect him to help get Sebastian straightened out. Charles is popular with the family, yet Lady Marchmain is disappointed that Charles is an atheist and prefers Sebastian to have more Catholic friends.

It is not expressly said, but possibly the drinking is because Sebastian can't reconcile being Catholic with homosexuality. Also, Lady M knows they are more than friendly and doesn't want Sebastian involved long-term in a relationship with another man. Interestingly, no one makes a big deal of the young men's relationships in college; the characters take these entanglements for granted and as temporary before assuming they will graduate to traditional marriage and children.

The opening half of Brideshead Revisited concerns Charles and Sebastian and moves slowly, including many scenes of drinking and traveling with rich people. I wasn't that captivated with the book at this point.

In the second half, Charles grows into a talented artist and marries a woman who helps with his career. The drama in this part of the book revolves around his relationship with Charles' sister Julia and her struggle between wanting to do as she wants with her personal life (in her case, marrying men who have not had their previous marriages annulled; a no-no in the Catholic church) and following the rules of the Catholic church, which somehow becomes more important to her after her parents die, first one and then the other.

One theme is how much the characters allow religion to rule their happiness, especially in the case of Sebastian and Julia. They struggle to balance what they want and need with what the church says they are allowed to have/do.

Narrator Charles is deeply involved with the family but not religious, so he maintains an obejectiviy on many of their issues. Although I'd describe the book as being about faith, it's not clear how strong Sebastian and Julia's feelings are about Catholicism as they never discuss it with Charles nor do they express their spiritual side or what it is they get out of observing the religion, there is only their behavior to go by and notice what it is taking out of them. Is their belief unquestioned and just innate within them despite their education and intelligence?

One element that is hard to reconcile is that infidelity is acceptable to the Marchmains over divorce. I was raised Catholic and am aware that cheating was never okay. Yet somehow, with the Marchmains, it is preferable to divorce/remarriage. In addition to Julia's well-known affair with Charles, Lord Marchmain kept a mistress, and his wife accepted this.

The second half moved quicker and was easier to get invested in, maybe because the story clarifies the stakes of the relationships.

The book ends on a down note and the feeling that Charles suffered just as much or more than the family he was involved with, despite not having the same internal conflicts with faith versus personal fulfillment.

This isn't going to be much of a review cos I honestly don't feel like I know this book well enough to even write a fair review, despite having finished it.

I'm quite glad that Waugh wrote a preface before this book explaining his frame of mind when writing this, and what he had set out to achieve. He had written this when on medical leave in WW2, sickened by his experiences, simultaneously homesick and also jaded. He wanted to write an eulogy to the culture of the English country house and its upper classes, which he saw to be on its way to irrelevance and obscurity. This helped me put a lot of this book into context, but even then - boy, was it a difficult book to finish.

Waugh's surfeit of descriptions and narrative was probably analogous to the meaningless excesses of the English upper class, but it didn't make it any easier to get through. I nearly DNFed multiple times in the first 25%. Things got a little smoother after that when some semblance of a plot picks up, but also not by a whole lot.

I'm really on the fence about this book. On one hand, I think I have some idea of what it's trying to do in a metatextual kind of way, and I can give props to that. On the other, it was sometimes entrancing, but sometimes really a slog to get through (and that may have been intentional on the author's part - but even so). There is maybe a group of people I would recommend this to but this is far from a blanket recommendation to anyone, even if they like classic literature.

‰ЫПIt needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one‰ЫЄs fatigue.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПHe simply wasn‰ЫЄt all there. He wasn‰ЫЄt a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.‰Ыќ

I'm not sure what the point of this book was. Nobody should have such wealth that they can futz around doing nothing and not going to class and dining and gossiping about nothing, and also it was quite obtuse. Like, for the first half the book I was just thinking, Charles and Sebastian should just hurry up and bang, and then they never* did even though they were together constantly and only wanted to be together in their apartment or whatever.

and when I say never did, I mean Waugh was never explicit about what their deal was, so it's possible I guess.And then it took a turn in the second half where Sebastian became a raging alcoholic and I was like WHEW thank goodness they never banged because this is a MESS.

But then suddenly Charles is married with two kids and he's never met one of them because he's very very busy painting in South America and his convenient wife is very busy throwing parties WHO IS WATCHING THESE CHILDREN, and they're both cheating on each other, but it's again, very obtuse. And he just CANNOT leave the people in Sebastian's family alone.

Anyway, I finished just in the nick of time for book club, and it'll make for a good discussion, based on the fact that a friend and I stood and talked about it in disbelief for a good 10 minutes the other day before either of us had finished.

CW: stillbirth (off-page, but mentioned several times)