Brideshead Revisited

I have to confess, I’m getting pretty sloppy about writing these blog posts. I finished this book probably two weeks ago and instead of blogging about it right away when it was fresh in my mind I put it off over and over again. It’s becoming a bad habit, waiting to long and then not having much to say about the book when all is said and done. I feel like I’m cheating it in some way by not giving it a proper memorial. Better late than never, though, right?

The complete title to Evelyn Waugh’s book is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

[Sidenote: I always forget that Evelyn Waugh is a man. Evelyn seems like such a feminine name, it’s not even one of those gender neutral it-could-go-either-way names like Kelsey or Jordan or even Shannon. It probably sucked having a girly name. Then again, I’ve always lived as a girl with a boy’s name, and it has served me pretty well. Except that time I was at the ER as a kid and the doctor was surprised I was female (Didn’t the F on the chart tip you off? Why am I trusting you with my healthcare?). But I digress.]

Starting the novel, I knew it would be about the life of Captain Ryder. The prologue starts in the outer ring of the narrative with some scenes from his life during the war, so it all makes sense. He literally revisits Brideshead, an estate tied to his past, which propels us into the novel-long flashback that is his character’s autobiography from college to sometime before he joined the army and explains the importance of the estate.

As the flashback/biography begins, we are introduced to Charles Ryder as a college student at Oxford and all his experiences beginning at that point. There he meets a fantastically absurd young man named Sebastian Flyte who is not only popular and fond of drinking parties (which are much different in 1923 Oxford than they are at modern universities, most notably being the absense of red plastic cups) but carries with him to all of his social engagements a Teddy-bear that he speaks of as if it were real. It’s as if he were some sort of debauched Christopher Robin and his bear Aloysius is a socialite version of Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe their relationship is more like Calvin and Hobbes. Either way its pretty atypical of the traditional 1920s male collegiate.

Through his friendship with Sebastian he meets the Flyte family with which he becomes permentanly entangled. He finds himself in the middle of a messy separation where Sebastian’s father moves to Italy with his mistress, his mother dies, and the family falls into dissaray. A daughter is married of shamefully and Sebastian becomes a runaway drunk. Meanwhile Charles is fostering his artistic abilites and becomes somewhat famous, marrying for image rather than admiration, and eventually having an affair with the shamefully married sister of his former best friend. At the end of the book Sebastian is living near a Catholic mission in Morocco as a marginalized character half in and half out of society, pious but too fond of drinking. Charles divorces his wife and leaves his children to take up with Sebastian’s sister, who after the death of her father leaves him. It is no surprise then that he is an empty shell of a man serving in the army during WWII barely admitting that he even knows the Brideshead estate at all.

The book was written really well, as the characters and locations all seemed lifelike rather than pastiches of reality. Early on the relationship of Charles and Sebastian reminded me of the sense of male camaraderie that is popular again in society, a “bromance” if you will. Seeing so much of Sebastian early in the novel had me expecting that despite being Charles’ point of view that this book would tell the story of his life instead. I think I would have much rather read about the life of a young man who carries a Teddy-bear and ends up lush in the tropics rather than a morose young man who becomes a lonely and cynical artist.