Literary Picks

Author: Edward Pickering

Title: "Brideshead Revisited"

Author: Evelyn Waugh

First published: 1945


Celebrated for his satiric novels of the 1930s, English novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote "Brideshead Revisited" during the Second World War while recuperating from a minor parachuting injury. Waugh's fourth and probably best-loved novel is largely serious, concerned with themes of class, religion and social change. The novel, whose full title is "Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder," reads as an elegy, a tribute to irretrievable loves and attachments.

At Oxford University, Charles Ryder befriends a fellow first year student, the eccentric and captivatingly beautiful Sebastian Flyte. Following Sebastian's lead, Ryder enters into a life of blithe hedonism. Absorbed in their friendship, the two abscond from responsibility and spend their time in the pursuit of gratification: they eat, drink, dress- even furnish their rooms- in style. Eventually, Sebastian invites Ryder to his home, the magnificent estate of Brideshead- an ancient center of English Catholicism. Here, Ryder meets the family with whom his life will become inextricably linked. A welcome guest, a close friend, a confidant, Ryder witnesses the disastrous outcome of the Flyte's attempts to redeem Sebastian. Effete and fragile, Sebastian spins away from his friend and family. In the ensuing years, with all their vagaries and severances, Ryder never escapes the aristocratic family whom he came to know as an undergraduate. The Flytes are members of an ultra-privileged but dwindling social class and are the pious followers of a demanding and restrictive religion. Ryder subsumes the incidents of his personal life (he becomes a noted architectural painter) under the larger drama of Sebastian's family. Their dysfunction, leading to demise, involves both Ryder's platonic and sexual love. Like an undercurrent, a sense of loss pervades the novel. Those passages in which Ryder pauses to reflect, to explain, to justify, are often sublime. Waugh is not a 'familiar' writer, maintaining instead a distance from the reader, a reserve from which he produces magnificent prose:

"Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence."

The event that triggers Ryder's memory and thus begins the novel is his chance return to Brideshead, years later, as an army captain. Arriving in the dead of night, Ryder's unit takes possession of the deserted estate and transforms it into a military camp. Here, amidst the bureaucratic bustle, Ryder confronts the defining relationships and loves of his past.