Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)

My second (old) Waugh – and it’s also about the Second World War (did you see what I did there?). I’d been hoping to sneak this onto my Goodreads challenge as three books, as Sword of Honour is an omnibus of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. Except it isn’t, as Waugh rewrote the trilogy as a single novel shortly before his death. So it goes down on the challenge as a single book. Anyway… The novel charts the war experience of Guy Crouchback, scion of show more an old Catholic aristocratic family now fallen on hard times. He has spent the between-war years in Italy and speaks the language fluently. But he’s a bit of a wet, and the British are so thoroughly incompetent they’re incapable of taking advantage of his language skills. The nearest he gets is serving in Croatia near the end of the war. In fact, if there’s one thing that comes across in Sword of Honour it’s how useless the British were. We like to pretend we won WWII, but we didn’t. Not really. The Soviets did. And the Americans. Initially, we just fucked up big time. That’s what Dunkirk was. A major fuck-up. And even after all that, we still had a country run by upper-class twits and it took a while for the competent middle-class to get control. Reading Sword of Honour makes Brexit seem a lot more understandable – or rather, the fucking hash our government has made of Brexit. And yet Sword of Honour was meant to be a satire. It’s based partly on Waugh’s own war experiences, although he makes a Crouchback a much more likeable protagonist than Waugh himself apparently was. Because was by all accounts he was a nasty piece of work – a total snob and arrogant and a good candidate for being shot by his own men. Waugh gives Crouchback a better, if more ironic, future in his rewrite of the trilogy, but it’s still an essentially cheerful novel for all that it takes the piss mercilessly out of the British armed forces during wartime. I thought it a great deal better than Vile Bodies, not just because its subject matter I found more interesting but because it didn’t feel so overdone. Recommended. show less

Brideshead Revisited is a curiously lopsided book. Waugh has a thorough command of tone and a distinctive and (usually) elegant prose style. However, he has no depth as an artist. The characters are flat; the tone is didactic. Waugh has some Big Ideas about truth, beauty, youth, history, time, love, faith, and more, but he has no particular interest in using the novelistic form to convey them. Instead what we get are little potted speeches and laboured paragraphs that hammer out his themes show more in obvious and needlessly baroque language. One gets the sense that Waugh means to evoke a certain feeling more than anything else: wistful nostalgia for simpler days, when the rich were rich, the poor were grateful, love was tragic, and beauty sublime. Catholicism is the great unifying force behind these ideas, but I do not see in Waugh any great spiritual insight. Rather, Waugh simply seems to like Catholicism for the vibes--what other religion opens up such grand vistas of guilt and redemptive suffering, and with such a sense of inevitability? How else to imagine the Brideshead clan, lounging in anemic repose, relishing their melodrama? Less charitably, Catholicism is just Very Old, and Waugh frequently seems to infer from the fact that things are old that they are good.

Whether the novel works for you will depend on your level of enchantment with Sebastian Flyte and his family of tragic, doomed aristocrats. The novel's drama hinges on the spiritual crisis of his family, and of interwar Britain as a whole, and if you do not find it terribly interesting to agonize over whether precious, charming Sebastian will return from his troubled wandering to the fold, you will find much of the book tedious. I found Sebastian to be insipid and uncompelling, and so was generally unmoved. Waugh seems to find these little dramas fascinating simply because the people involved are sophisticates. But he has no interest in the broader human race, and so it is hard to take his preoccupations seriously.

Two things elevate the novel. First is the unexpected exploration of queer love in an environment (1920s Oxford) that you might think would be entirely hostile to it. This is cool and interesting. Second is the doubt that seeps in around the corners of the novel. Anthony Blanche, the novel's best character, tells our narrator near the end of the novel: "I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you." I wonder what Waugh would have to say about this passage. Charles, our narrator and clear stand-in for Waugh, has just been chastised for the blinkered narrowness of his artistic output, for his all-too-English fascination with the neat and tidy over the true and the beautiful. No doubt Waugh sees himself as standing apart from Charles in some way--Waugh gave himself fully over to Catholicism whereas Charles remains merely Catholic-curious. My best guess is that Charles represents to Waugh a possible version of himself: here's what I might have turned out to be, had I not turned to the true faith, to the love of the beauty and power of God. But really what he has put in Blanche's mouth is the most damning criticism possible of the novel it occurs in. Brideshead Revisited is a paean to charm, an utterly credulous and infatuated account of the cultivated, artificial delicacy of the rich and very fancy. It is valuable as a document of a uniquely conservative brand of aestheticism; not so much as a novel. show less

The story opens with a Prologue. During WWII, Captain Charles Ryder of the British Army has arrived at Brideshead Castle, which has been requisitioned by the government and converted to a military encampment. Charles has a long history with this place, and the rest of the novel flashes back to relate his experiences with the Marchmain (Flyte) family, owners of the estate. Part II recounts Charles’s time at Oxford as a student of art, starting in 1922, where he befriends classmate Sebastian show more Flyte, the second son of Lord and Lady Marchmain. Sebastian leads a dissolute lifestyle, and Charles is enthralled with him. He meets the rest of the family, Sebastian’s elder brother, ”Bridey,” and sisters, Julia and Cordelia. Lord and Lady Marchmain are separated. Lady Marchmain is devoutly Catholic and she refuses him a divorce. Lord Marchmain now lives in Venice with his mistress. Charles is not religious, and he finds himself in the middle of the various family viewpoints (and a few arguments) about religion.

The tone is nostalgic, as an older Charles relates the experiences of his younger days. Religious faith plays a relevant role as a source of meaning for many of the characters. Others have taken the agnostic path. The primary conflicts arise due to family dynamics and different views of religion. The first part of the book is focused on Charles and Sebastian’s relationship (it is obliquely implied that it may be romantic, but always falls back into friendship.) The second half is dominated by Charles and Julia’s relationship, and Sebastian’s increasing alcohol addiction.

“I had seen him grow wary at the thought of his family or his religion; now I found I, too, was suspect. He did not fail in love, but he lost his joy of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude. As my intimacy with his family grew I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.”

Waugh employs rich and evocative language. He deftly manages to insert wry humor into the narrative, providing a nice counterbalance to the many serious topics. The country estate is almost a character unto itself. It represents many elements of Charles’s life – his youthful adventures, development as an artist, and romantic involvements. This book is a classic. In my opinion, it holds up due to its many universal themes – friendship, family, memories, art, addiction, class, and love. show less

A novel told in retrospective, Charles Ryder shares the tale of his two decades of relationship with the Catholic Marchmain family and their sparkling way of life that slowly disappears on the cusp of WWII. Beginning with his fascination and friendship with Sebastian at Oxford and his later attraction to Julia, Ryder's narrative meanders through memories that are as beautiful and as fleeting as the moments themselves.

Waugh's novel is rich in textures with truly brilliant turns of phrase show more suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Given that a substantial portion of the novel takes part in the 1920s, comparisons with [The Great Gatsby] are inevitable. However, the work has a distinct flavour, not only because sections occur during the 1930s and WWII, but because Charles Ryder's development is far more rich than Fitzgerald's narrator. The characters are fascinating from Sebastian and his teddy-bear, Aloysius, to Lady Marchmain and her devout Catholicism to Julia and her sparkling sadness. Ryder's attempts to understand and bond with these last standard-bearers of a society that is disappearing is equally intriguing. A novel that glimmers with the glamours of a bygone era and a reminder that "we possess nothing certainly but the past." show less