Brideshead Revisited

Posted on | July 7, 2009 | Comments Off

If you’ve been to a fairly decent gallery, you will have come across some phenomenal art. Some pieces gloriously revel in the talent of their makers; expressive, accomplished, and admirable. But It’ll be a long time before I’m sticking The Matrydom of Saint Sebastian on my wall at home. A lot of exquisite art is impeccable, but as much as it is faultless, it can also be depressing, bleak and disheartening. Perhaps it takes a genius of his medium to make you appreciate the mastery of his depiction, even when that depiction is saddening, unwanted or pessimistic.

Brideshead Revisited is essentially a book about decay. Its relentless morbidity covers over everything from British colonialism, religion and faith through to Atlantic sea travel. A lot of the focus is on the waning luxuries of the upper class in 1920’s Britain- economic superiority taking with it the last flavours of British colonialism-come-tourism, English architecture and Oxbridge education (as they knew them). But that’s not where it ends.

The sense of decay permeates through literally every avenue of the book- it is predominantly a tale of unravelling relationships and values, played out in a society which doesn’t outlive the novel. But just as Charles’s marriage dies a death and his ambitions for his son are dispensed with the indifference of middle age, so too do the ‘good families’ disappear, the houses he painted in his youth demolished to pay bills, and contacts and friends either written out, or more depressingly, ignored.

What is really disheartening about the book is that this decay is metered out with such casual indifference. Key relationships don’t explode in a ball of fury, they are simply lost to missed appointments or forgetfulness- even the novel doesn’t do the justice of portraying their demise in some cases- we merely snap back to a character twenty years on and their family breakdown is summed up in a few curt sentences. No apocalyptic events herald the world’s demise; instead, the steady persistence underlies the inevitability of it all.

The book is not about mourning though- the opening pages of Charles’s university days show that even the ‘good life’ which dies in the book’s time was never really enjoyed by the people who lived it. Hope that this book is suggestive of a perhaps less materialistic future, or more stable society don’t linger- the book itself is a reminiscence of a soldier running a meaningless chore in a meaningless battle of the second world war. From the outset Waugh affords the reader no hope: timeless inhuman suffering and destruction, as displayed in the second war, is the ultimate endpoint for this story about us humans.

So, having done my best to beat through the novel as quick as possible and put it down, you can imagine at the end I’m not all songs and dance.

But is it possible to admire and appreciate Sebastian’s Matyrdom or the Rape of Europa? Of course it is. That Waugh is able to portray so many characters (the book seems to have dozens) without reverting to caricature, and yet still portray them vividly shows he can’t be a crap writer. ‘Loveable’ isn’t the right word, but even from the second chapter you have a strange affinity for Charles, and an understanding of the other key characters (I hesitate to call them protagonists). Perhaps you need to, in order to fully empathise with their despair.

The worst reason to put down a book is out of boredom. I wanted to put the book down almost non-stop, but because it was ‘good’. Horrifically sad, yes, but good as literature; it ‘worked’. Waugh’s characters and writing are excellent, the novel’s shape, like a dead cushion with no stuffing, only adds to it. I don’t think I helped the situation by reading this on the back of the saccharine and beautiful Clochmerle, but Brideshead has to be respected, as a well written collection of good characters.

I am compelled to appreciate it. But I’ll eat my hat before I ever hang it from my wall.