Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
I saw one blogger describe Brideshead Revisited as: rich people, drunk. Another reviewer said he hates the story but loves Waugh’s style. Both seem like fair comments.
I like stories about British aristocrats–drawing room dramas, usually centered around getting some girl married off. This isn’t that kind of book.
At first I thought the book was about the narrator and Sebastian and just exactly how fond of each other they were. You know, the typical British school-boys in love but could never admit it sort of thing. Then Sebastian all but disappeared from the plot and the narrator switched to his sister, Julia.
Then I thought it was a book about the deterioration of a rich family. I’ve never seen “deterioration of a rich family” mentioned in a list of standard plots but maybe it should be. I’ve already come across two other novels in the 100 Best list that use it: The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. Want to write the great American novel? Find a nice family and document their decline.
But eventually I decided that Brideshead Revisited wasn’t about either repressed homosexual love or aristrocracy in decline. It’s about how bad being Catholic can screw you up, especially if you’re a lapsed Catholic. Apparently you can run, but not hide, from Catholicism.
At first it seemed the religious references were just background filler–something to know about the family, like that they tended to be tall. But religion kept playing a bigger and bigger role until by the end it had defined and controlled all the Catholic characters, especially the ones who had tried to leave the church.
I’d call this over-reaction except I knew someone a bit like that once. He wouldn’t confess so he couldn’t take communion but he kept going to church, and God and his sins seemed to haunt him. We were nineteen and dating and he wouldn’t have sex. I guess the Catholic church does a pretty good job of getting under your skin so you can never get it out. Count me glad not to have been raised Catholic.
The book was interesting and built to a nice conclusion. My only argument with the style would be the bracketing current-day chapters, which were full of uninteresting and complex Army manoeuvrings. I guess the war was on everyone’s mind when Waugh wrote this so perhaps it seemed necessary to frame the story in the context of the war, but all these years later the war seems an external intrusion into what is otherwise an internal story.