Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh

Two weeks ago, I first saw the sumptuous trailer for Brideshead Revisited and thought, Mother of Pearl, I'm gonna have to read that beast in the next six days. This, not one day after I'd bought 5 other books that were lounging on my bedside table, waiting to be read, in addition to the 4 I'm currently reading. But I've been meaning to read Brideshead for about a decade, and I can't see the film before I do, and I want to see the film ASAP. So there you have it.

Brideshead is one of those books that's been shelved in a mental library alongside other titles that have been recommended to me by Readers -- those whose own literary tastes and conquests I both admire and envy. I seemed to remember a relative of mine (the one who is a somewhat renowned Joycean scholar) encouraging me to read Brideshead, but when I pulled up the email, what she'd actually said was that the novel, "finally, isn't all that good." Now, on this, we disagree. Mightily. For what I felt, in the handful of hours that it took me to barrel through this book, was rapture.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps.

But I honestly had no clue what to expect from this book, and feared that I too would find it not all that good. Rather, I was almost giddy to discover Charles Ryder. I haven't fallen so hard for a narrator since Nick Carraway.

Here is as much as I can tell you: the novel takes place in England (with jaunts to Venice and Paris and Morocco) in between the two World Wars. Charles Ryder, a middle-class, aspiring artist, comes to Oxford to read history. There, he meets and (presumably) falls in love with Lord Sebastian Flyte, the charming but haunted youngest son of a fading English dynasty. Sebastian's attempts to keep Charles away from his family ultimately fail, and if you want to get overly simplistic, you could say that once Charles's path crosses with the rest of the Flyte family, the wheels of their downfall are set in motion. Only, Waugh doesn't ultimately believe in downfall (at least not for the the main characters), and seeks to suffuse everyone's experience ultimately with grace. Whether you find Waugh's version of grace in line with your own (I don't), or even in line with what you'd like to see happen to these characters is beside the point. The point is that Waugh is a damn fine writer.

Here:

Charles's decision to go and formally meet Sebastian: I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Or this, shortly after Ryder's acquaintance with the Flytes: But I was as untouched by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather, I was touched by both alike. I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist -- only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.

Do not let me misrepresent Charles Ryder, he is not all soliloquy. I jotted down the page numbers of dozens of these passages and phrases (and as I flip through them now, I am compelled to turn off the Olympics and begin the whole brilliant mess again) but if I don't rein myself in now, it'll be too late.

Three things that were evident nearly immediately in this book: that I would miss it sorely when it was finished. That it would be finished too soon. And that (even now, after a few days to think it over) I would be hard pressed to come up with another author whose panoply of characters are so alive. There is a largish cast here. And it seems the secondaries were never let in on their second-class status. Waugh has written each one so completely and effortlessly and lovingly that I should nearly expect to bump into them were I to find myself in London or Paris or Venice or Morocco during those in between years.

It's hard to speak in any more real detail about this book without spoiling it. It is a tragicomedy. And a love story. And then a second love story. There is a moral imperative, which I find neither moral nor imperative, but am perfectly satisfied with nonetheless. It was a delight to read.

As soon as I finished it, I sent a text to Martin that said: Just finished Brideshead. Right now, at this very moment, the thought of ever reading another book again feels like adultery.

I don't have much higher praise than that.