Brideshead Revisited

The status this novel has as one of the quintessential Oxford novels is more than cause enough for me to want to read it. Although I purchased a lovely hardback edition while studying at Oxford, I never did get round to reading it there. I picked it up again due to the impending release of a new movie adaptation of the book in November 2008, intending to finish the novel before watching the movie. I managed neither. My friend Karin recently purchased the 11 episode ITV adaptation (dating from 1981 and starring a youngish Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and scripted by the recently deceased John Mortimer of Rumpole fame). Since she lent it to me, I decided to finally get round to reading the book, and after that watching the ITV series.

The novel itself is to a large degree an examination of the decline of the English aristocracy through the eyes of Charles Ryder's relationship with the Marchmain family. Indeed, it is a telling point that Ryder makes his fame as an artist by painting the aristocratic houses before they are forced to close or to be sold, profiting as it is from their financial decline while also capturing them it their last glory. Similarly, the decline of the Marchmain clan is seen through Charles' eyes particularly through his relationship with Sebastian Flyte (his old Oxford chum) and Julia, his sister.

As for the much vaunted Oxford section, it was a world almost totally alien to me, despite having spent three years in one of the more traditional colleges (women were only admitted in 1979). It was a time of servants, and real separation between the majority who were privileged and those who were not. This upper-class aristocratic reserve was a highly endangered species in my Oxford, ironically as belittled in modern times as those who were not similarly privileged were treated by them in the past. The lifestyle of secretive dining clubs where languid philosophical debates were had in accents that could sear through butter were akin to sightings of a mythical highly endangered species - the occasional report filtered in, but one wondered if they were real or just imaginary. The last vestiges of Oxford as it was.

I should say straight out that I didn't particularly enjoy the book. Reading it in several bits and pieces over a holiday in Cambodia (on the two flights, on a long bus ride between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, and in various hotel rooms) certainly didn't aid my appreciation of it. Perhaps as a result I failed to see how subtly Waugh manages to tie the threads of the different sections together. Most critics acknowledge that Brideshead is the most richly written of Waugh's works (perhaps directly as a result of the wartime shortages and privations he faced during the writing of the novel - his various appetites fulfilled on the page where it could not be fulfilled in real life) but I found the language occasionally turgid and sometimes excessive.

Given Waugh's own fervent catholicism, it is unsurprising that religion plays a significant role in the novel. As it is presented in the novel, religion has the ultimate power to redeem, though it also suggests that to try and come closer to God is to invite suffering. Religious redemption comes especially to Sebastian, who finds a measure of solace and self-worth in religion from his dissolute and drunken lifestyle. It also ends up as the irreconcilable stumbling block between Charles and Julia. To Waugh's credit, both sides of Catholicism are presented, and Lady Marchmain's holier than though embracement of martyrdom isn't shied away from. One can't help but feel that the whole notion of faith and guilt and redemption is handled better by Waugh's fellow Catholic Englishman Graham Greene.