Brideshead Revisited

Synopsis: The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

Review: Brideshead Revisited or, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, is a story told in flashback, of Charles Ryder, and his fascination and infatuation, with the Flyte family at Brideshead. The story starts in England during WWII, Captain Charles Ryder and his men have been ordered to leave their barracks and travel to their next billet. They travel by train, and reach the outskirts of their destination in darkness and bad weather. They set up camp for the night, and in the morning Charles asks his second-in-command, for the name of the place they are heading to.

'He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight'

Charles begins to reminisce about his first visits to Brideshead, more than twenty years before, and about how he first met Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University (after a night of revelry Sebastian appeared at Charles's ground floor open window and promptly vomited into the room).

Sebastian is a complex character, quite childlike in a way, he carries his teddy bear Aloysius every where with him and converses with him as you would a friend or confidante, he's also charming, charismatic and self destructive. He appears to have a difficult relationship with his family (he is the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain) and takes Charles on his first visit to Brideshead when he knows most of them will be absent.

Charles's relationship with his own father Ned is strained (and though I could see it was painful for Charles, I did find myself laughing at Ned's seemingly innocent but scathing remarks) and he's relieved when, during the holidays, he is summoned to Brideshead by a telegram from Sebastian that says 'Gravely injured come at once'. Fortunately, Sebastian has only cracked a bone in his ankle playing croquet .. a bone 'so small, that it hasn't a name' but he has no-one at home to keep him company. His sister Julia picks Charles up at the station but has pressing engagements of her own to attend to and all the rest of the family have already gone (the Father has long since eloped to Italy with his mistress).

This is when Charles really gets to know Brideshead and the Flyte family. Lady Marchmain, a strict Catholic, abandoned by her husband and trying to keep control of the rest of the family. Lord 'Bridey' Brideshead the eldest son, amiable enough but a bit stuffy and serious, with the same devout Catholic views as his Mother. Cordelia, the youngest sister, precocious, intelligent and loving, with the most devout Catholic belief of all. Julia, physically similar to Sebastian, confident and assured but wavering and doubtful about Catholicism. And of course, Sebastian, engaging and attractive, troubled and secretive and a self confessed half-heathen (though still believing in Catholicism as a 'lovely idea').Charles is an agnostic, and so is in turns bemused, irritated and curious, about the family's strict adherence to the Catholic faith.

Charles falls in love with Sebastian, he says he has been searching for love and then with Sebastian found 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' ... though whether it was a fully realised sexual love is debatable ... nothing overt is mentioned. Later on in the story he falls in love with Julia, but you can't help thinking that it's partly down to her connections with Brideshead, and her physical resemblance to Sebastian.

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Sebastian's life disintegrates spectacularly, maybe bought on by the constraints of his strict and religious upbringing. His occasional drinking bouts descend into fully fledged alcoholism, and he becomes a concern, and an embarrassment to Lady Marchmain. He drifts away from the family, and from Charles, and flees to Morocco, where he continues his dissolute lifestyle. I missed him a lot when he disappeared from the narrative (only to be mentioned in passing) and found the second half of the book not quite as enjoyable as the first.

Charles himself drifts away from the Marchmain family, he gets married and fathers two children, but is unhappy and restless. He encounters Julia again by chance and they strike up a relationship, but with new found Catholic fervour, Julia eventually decides that she cannot marry him, and instead joins the women's service, and ends up nursing in Palestine with Cordelia.

The story ends with Charles himself, twenty years after his first visit, saying a prayer of 'ancient and newly-learned word's', in the old Brideshead chapel. And you surmise from this, that he is possibly taking the first tentative steps towards his own conversion to the Catholic faith.

Exquisitely written, I enjoyed the first half enormously. The second half was far more melancholic, reflective and religious in tone but I still enjoyed it.