"Brideshead Revisited" is the kind of novel that seeps into your skin and bones just from scanning a few pages, and when read at length can fill your head for days with the language and vision of the lost world author Evelyn Waugh conjures back from the dead. Yet its sharp insights on society and religion, not to mention liberal and welcome doses of sarcastic good humor, offer far more than a mere precious curio.
Charles Ryder, an officer in the British Army, finds himself suddenly stationed at a base located at the now-empty manor house of his long-lost friend, Sebastian Flyte, and his noble family. Being back at Brideshead, as this country seat is called, stirs Charles to remember what he had, what he lost, and what he carries with him.
Waugh's ability with language and his keen insights into the human condition are on full display in this, his best-loved work, though it's atypically serious of intent for someone who is popularly thought of simply as a curmudgeonly, grandiloquent wit. For all his talent on display in other novels, you get a sense it came together here in a remarkable way. Waugh here paints a detailed and celebratory portrait of the good life, of picnicking on strawberries and white wine in secluded bowers, trysts on cruise ships, and life lived amid museum-caliber splendor, yet at the same time presents a compelling argument for Catholic austerity and discipline in seeking life's higher purpose.
For Charles, it is a hard journey that takes him from being a young student at Oxford who believes with confidence "that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom" to becoming a sadder, older man who begins to ponder: "Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us."
Waugh writes with a fine sense of style and language, and cleverness, too, but in this book, unlike any of the others of his I have read, you get a feeling of sympathy, too, of people being observed not just with precision and wit but compassion, too, which is both unexpected and welcome. He promotes his faith unreservedly, but not uncritically, offering hard questions and a sense of grace as hard-won. Humor, too; like the stories one girl tells a credulous would-be convert about how Catholics all believe in "sacred monkeys" and sleep with their feet pointing East "because that's the direction to Heaven."
The occasional purpleness of the prose and some later dialogue is oft-commented upon, True, Waugh let himself go sometimes, but given the beauty of his writing, which is really about the best there is, its hard to begrudge the extra line, or the odd declamation that rings a bit false upon reflection. So much else here feels so alive. This is a book worth reading; savoring, too, though the reading's the only part you will have to work at.
Whether or not you find the task of reading the novel daunting, worth checking out is David Cliffe's Evelyn Waugh website, which includes a detailed and illuminating "Brideshead" reading companion, and of course the excellent Grenada TV series from 1981, which is how I and so many others got here in the first place. Do join us, and bring your teddy bear.
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