Brideshead Revisited

I'm not quite sure how to feel about 'Brideshead Revisited', to be honest. I found it beautifully written and appealing, with the atmosphere of a vivid dream. I couldn't quite get a handle on the characters, who seemed both oddly familiar and frustratingly unreal. Sometimes I felt as though I'd met members of the Marchmain family, at other moments they seemed alien. Possibly this is due to my confused and ambivalent feelings about the upper class stratum this novel is set within.

That said, Charles' infatuation with Sebastian was bittersweet and very involving. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about the novel was the absence of closure for their relationship. Did they ever meet again? What happened to Sebastian? I'd love to know, show more although the novel's pervasive nostalgia would probably be jarred by any such conclusion. Sebastian himself reminded me of Mishima's hero in 'Spring Snow', Kioaki. Both are bewitching, beautiful, tragic wastrels. I preferred Waugh's narration by someone who loves the tragic hero to Mishima giving the point of view to the wastrel himself, though. Charles is an interesting narrator, as he is clearly very emotionally controlled, seemingly editing himself in places and unaware of his own feelings in others. This is perhaps as nostalgic of its time as everything else in the book. Likewise the apparent tacit understanding but silence regarding the romantic, very likely also sexual, involvement of Charles and Sebastian.

To me, the most striking scene in the book was the debate around Lord Marchmain's deathbed. I was impressed with the cynicism of the argument about deathbed conversions, despite the outcome. Although Catholicism and its attendant guilt haunted the book, the message I took from it was that for the Marchmain family religion had become a means to justify their life decisions, rather than a faith as such. That is likely my own cynicism talking, I'm sure it could be interpreted otherwise. It makes for an intriguing theme, certainly.

Upon writing this, my main feeling for 'Brideshead Revisited' seems to be that I enjoyed it, but feel a little sullied by nostalgia for a world of privilege, snobbery, and over-entitlement. I took the novel quite personally, perhaps. It certainly has great power about it. show less

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.

This book is objectively better than the 3 stars I am giving it, but I simply did not enjoy it very much?

Charles is doomed the second he falls in with the Flyte family. He can’t stay friends with the eccentric Sebastian and keep him from alcoholism. He can’t marry Julia. He isn’t with the same faith as Lady Marchmain and her two other children.
The first part was atmospheric and decadent in the way the interbellum aristocracy probably was. I got a sense of the life Sebastian was living, in all his rich noble ridiculousness. It was almost beautiful at times.
Simultaneously, Sebastian is being sad about show more his strained relationship with his very catholic family and that leads to the red thread throughout the rest of the book: Catholicism as a crutch in life, whether as limiting force or as hopeful one.
I think this book managed to be infused with the ideas of catholic faith and grace without being OVERLY moral about it. Being catholic is still presented as good, but it also caused a lot of drama. The plot of this book would be nonexistent otherwise.
I liked the idea that faith in itself is something steady and waiting for the right time. That after everything, the church is still there for Charles to choose when he wishes.
I didn’t like all the drama around the the people who insist that catholicism is the way for other people. It felt highly realistic to have Julia’s wedding to Rex be such a difficult affair, but I didn’t enjoy that part as much. Lady Marchmain and her son keep sneaking Catholic talks into her conversations with Charles, it felt like peer pressure.

I think I am too far removed from these characters and the settings to be fully immersed into the interpersonal drama. I’m not religious, so I can logically understand the large role it plays in the Flyte family, but I don’t think I can truly grasp it.
By contrast, I don’t understand the romance between Charles and Julia at all. The entire second half of the novel was meh to me. I didn’t get what drew them together so every time something came up I thought that they were so much better off sticking to their own lives? Just leave each other alone?

D.A.2. 7 Dune 2026 show less

Fancy Oxford of long ago, students yelling T.S. Elliot poems out of windows and trying to out-quote one another over their wine. I found this high-class set almost impossible to relate to but fun to read about, with their bizarre quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Charles Ryder is obsessed with the Flyte family and their estate, primarily the younger son Sebastien who bears the hallmarks of having suffered some form of abuse. Sebastien has an enduring fondness for the comfort of his teddy bear Aloysius and frequently attempts to dissociate from his family, reluctant to return home for visits. He enters a downward spiral once his mother's reach extends even into his life at Oxford. The abuse in this case is overbearing parenting, the inability show more to escape his mother's constant analysis and judgements.

Narrator Charles is fully present in the story, generally tolerable, but he's a self-centered twit. I can respect him making a mistake in whom he marries, but not his attitude toward his children whom he coldly refers to as his wife's 'project' and expresses zero interest in. From that moment I didn't particularly care about him anymore. It crystalized the fact for me that his only empathy is for Sebastien, and his later obsession with Julia feels like a sad extension of that. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed this reread of Waugh's 1945 novel. I had not remembered that he wrote it while on leave from WWII. Knowing when he was writing it makes the nostalgia of the first section, in particular, that is set in the 1920s, feel more meaningful.

In the novel, Charles Ryder is a WWII officer getting ready to deploy. While they are still in England, they end up staying at the enormous country home of Brideshead. Ryder was connected with the family in his young adulthood, and the Flytes had a formative effect on his life. He reminisces about those years.

There are three parts and they are all very different. The first was my favorite. It takes place at Oxford and the young men are living the typical carefree life of young, well-off show more men away from home for the first time. Charles meets Sebastian Flyte, one of the most memorable characters I've come across in literature. Sebastian introduces Charles to his Catholic family at Brideshead and Charles is immediately enamored of the entire family and estate. Sebastian, however, is an alcoholic and sinking fast. Charles and Sebastian's relationship is the central part of this section. It is nostalgic and somehow both leisurely and a bit manic at the same time.

The second part sees Charles become an architectural artist and go off of South America to expand his art work. He's married but an inattentive husband and completely uninterested in his kids. On the boat back to England, Charles and his wife Celia reconnect with Sebastian's sister, Julia.

The third part includes goes back to Brideshead and revisits the Flyte siblings and parents. There's a heavy Catholic theme throughout the book (I gather Waugh had converted to Catholicism by this point in his life) and it all really comes to a head in this section.

It was interesting to me that Sebastian isn't really seen in the second half of the book, but somehow Waugh keeps him ever-present and central to the story. I thought that was pretty brilliant. Lots of themes to ponder and some really beautiful writing. I really enjoyed this reread. 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 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 show more 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

For some reason, my choice in books has been leading me to those with obvious themes of decadence, decay, and destruction. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve read or finished Philip Rieff’s “Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us,” (Rieff manages to make Oswald Spengler look like Pippy Longstocking) Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” and now “Brideshead Revisited.” This wasn’t exactly planned out, but reading them so close together has been a wonderful experience, and not nearly as disheartening as one might think it would be.

Picking up “Brideshead Revisited,” I had the odd feeling that it would end up being much like “Lucky Jim.” It would have its moments, but in the end it would show more be too peculiar to English mores and ways of life to translate very well for the American reader of the twenty-first century. My initial impression couldn’t have been more wrong. It is full of a beautiful pathos, a reverence and passion for those things that have been irrevocably lost, and contains a poignant portrait of a youthful relationship that will stick with me for a while.

The entire thing is a flashback; only in the prologue do we learn that the narrator, Charles Ryder, is actually remembering the novel retroactively twenty years in the future while serving as an officer in World War II. Like Proust’s, his memories are set off by a particular sensory experience, namely his bivouacking at Brideshead, the palatial residence of his best friend he met at Oxford, Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian comes from an incredibly wealthy family, and carries a teddy bear named Aloysius everywhere he goes. (It’s also pretty explicitly stated that Sebastian is a homosexual, and doesn’t bother hiding it.) He and Charles become fast friends on campus, often getting drunk together. Sebastian suggests that Charles meet his family, and he slowly develops relationships with Sebastian’s mother and siblings. Much of the novel contains beautiful descriptions of Brideshead and its invaluable art and architecture; Waugh even calls the first part of the book “Et in Arcadia Ego.” When Charles starts to develop friendships with his family members, his drinking quickly spirals out of control, and he starts to exhibit the typical symptoms of denial and drinking in private.

While Charles and Sebastian are agnostics, Sebastian’s family is immured in cultural Catholicism, which complicates his relationship within the family, especially Julia, Sebastian’s sister. There is even a beautiful art nouveau chapel on the estate which Julia and her mother visit often. This combined with Sebastian’s drinking leads to Charles’ estrangement from the family. Julia and Charles eventually enter into loveless marriages, but eventually plan to divorce their mutual spouses to marry one another. However, when the family patriarch, Lord Marchmain, comes back home from Italy to Brideshead to live his last days, there is tension between Julia and Charles about giving Lord Marchmain his last rites. Because of this, Julia decides that their marriage will be impossible. The epilogue returns to Ryder’s unexpected billet at Brideshead, where the prologue began, and where we learn that he’s lead a life as an architectural historian and draughtsman.

I thought this novel was stunning. Waugh paints a picture of England in the interwar years that is full of nostalgia, but is never maudlin or saccharine. It’s about loss – the loss of friendship, the loss of Catholic religion and traditional values, the loss of youth, and the loss of innocence. These are great themes, and Waugh treats them spectacularly. For some great insight into the feelings and intellectual currents that informs the characters, I highly recommend Richard Overy’s “The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars,” which topically discusses some of the cultural themes that informs much of the book. show less

Evocative and nostalgic tale, infused with religion and (homo)sexuality, and hence passion, betrayal and guilt.

The later part, about Charles and Celia and then Charles and Julia is more subtle, realistic and sad than the light frivolity of Oxford days.

Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" has many echoes of this (review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/380807175).

It's five years since I last read this, but a few ideas that have come back to me by discussing it elsewhere:

SEGREGATION
People were strongly segregated by class and gender in those days. Not only were the schools (at least, the sort that Charles and Sebastian attended) single-sex, so were the colleges at university. The fact that people of their background were show more invariably packed off to boarding school from the age of 7 or 8, not returning until the holidays, created segregation from their parents as well. And of course there weren't many scholarship boys to broaden the social mix.

HOMOSEXUALITY
When I first read the book as a naive teenager, I thought the book was somewhat ambiguous about Charles and Sebastian's relationship. As an adult, I have no doubt that it was sexual, but that although Sebastian is gay, Charles is towards the straight end of bisexual: his attraction, nay obsession, is more with the Marchmain family than any individual member of it. Lady Marchmain is mostly in the shadows, but she's always pulling the strings - until Charles tangles everything.

Naked male friends sunbathing may seem very gay nowadays, but was less so for Charles and Sebastian in Oxford. Nudism and "health and efficiency" were popular at the time, and there was nothing inherently gay about it. Kafka was a straight man of the period who was an enthusiast.

Also, as recently as the early 1980s there was a men-only nudist club on the banks of the river in central Oxford, (in)famously frequented by dons (professors) and clergy. It may still be there, though if so, it might be mixed sex, as the colleges themselves are. If you want to Google it, it was (is?) called Parsons' Pleasure!

ALOYSIUS
Sebastian takes his teddy bear to Oxford and treats him as a living pet. Although his presence clearly signals a certain immaturity, I suspect that in Sebastian's mind it was at least as much a deliberate ploy to be seen as appealingly eccentric.

Apparently this element is based on John Betjeman taking his bear, Archibald Ormsby-Gore, to Oxford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Ormsby-Gore).

CATHOLICISM
To me, the Church is portrayed pretty negatively, yet some Catholics see it in a more positive light, and Waugh himself converted. I'm not sure whether that reflects a strength or a weakness in Waugh's writing.

Even so, how is this for biting satire, when Lady Marchmain is talking to Charles about her wealth and the perception that wealth can interfere with following Christ:

"It [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that is is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included."
(Book 1, Chapter V, p. 113)

BRIDESHEAD, OXFORD AND ME
I have many fond associations with this book: I was at secondary school in Oxford (a single-sex school, where I was a boarder), so know the city well, and something of communal, single-sex living. I first read the book and also saw the excellent Granada TV adaptation at that time, and had a bit of a crush on Anthony Andrews (who played Sebastian).

2008 FILM
Whereas the TV series was obsessively faithful to the book, the 2008 film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412536/) changed the plot significantly. The timeline differed, Julia was more prominent, and there was much more time in Venice.

To my surprise, once I let go of expectations of it being close to the book, I really enjoyed it. show less