Brideshead Revisted - Evelyn Waugh (audio)

About six months ago, this book was highly recommended to me by John Cole, a trusted non-blogging book-loving friend. We had both agreed we needed to stop reading trashy top 10 stuff, and delve more into classic literature. He felt this one classified as such. Then last week, I ran to the library in an audio book emergency, and here it sat, waiting to fulfill my classically undernourished life. The cherry on top? That it was narrated by Jeremy Irons, who starred in the PBS version of this book back in the '80's. Sold! I dove into it head-first during a 3 hour road trip I took last Sunday.

Probably the only thing I knew about this book going into it is its famous, timeless symbol - Sebastian Flyte, a dapper, unruly, carefree Oxford student that carried around a teddy bear as a pet. It is true that a portion of this book is aptly represented by this whimsy, but grows into a much larger, meditative expansive story.

Our narrator is Charles Ryder. When we meet him, it is 1944 and he is a captain of the British army. He describes himself as "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless". Yikes. It is obvious this is a man with a story, and some hard knocks under his belt. He finds his regiment billeted at Brideshead, an estate which has been abused and ravaged because of the war, sadly forgotten and neglected. He begins to reminisce about Brideshead in an earlier, better life...

Charles meets Sebastian at Oxford in the '20s. Sebastian is angelically handsome, an aristocrat, and wild as hell. His personality is flamboyant, and draws admirers like flies. His family has owned Brideshead for generations. They begin what I believe to be a platonic yet impassioned relationship. Sebastian has deep-rooted issues though. I will list them per my dime store psychoanalysis. First, his family. He doesn't want Charles to come near them. He loves them but abhors them, and knows that if they get their claws in Charles, he will be lost to him. Second, religion. His family members are borderline Catholic zealots, and Sebastian does not follow in their footsteps. (Neither does Charles, who is agnostic, which will come to haunt later.) Third, his sexuality, which, in the book, is vague, but to me pretty obvious. All of these factors transform Sebastian into an alcoholic bent on self-destruction. About halfway through the book, he disappears into North Africa, and eventually joins a monastery ironically, a withered defeated shell of his old self.

Against Sebastian's wishes, Charles does indeed get drawn into the Flyte family. After Sebastian falls off the face of the earth, he becomes a successful architectural artist, marries a bimbo he doesn't love, and has a couple of kids he is completely detached from as a result of his travels. He is reacquainted with Julia, Sebastian's sister and his spitting image, and falls deeply in love with her. More psychoanalysis...Julia is Sebastian's replacement. Charles and Julia divorce their spouses, but at Julia's father's deathbed, things fall apart, their love affair a tragic victim of issues bigger than the both of them.

The story is big, sweeping, epic in nature. It so beautifully captures the decadence of this time in history. The underlying thread woven throughout the story (there always is one!) is religion and theology, specifically Catholicism. I'd read that Waugh was a converted Catholic, and I had a hard time with this for most of the book, as he seemed disparaging towards this branch of Christianity. Religion caused Sebastian's father to resent his wife and flee to Italy and take a mistress. It drove Sebastian to alcholism, and it drove Julia to rebellion then devotion. In the end, however, Charles finds God in his heart, and is so uplifting. It is not sentimental - that would not appeal to me at all - but is very subtle. As Charles is kneeling in the private chapel in Brideshead in 1944, we are left with an amazing passage:

"Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played. Something none of us thought about at the time. A small red flame, a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten copper doors of the tabernacle. The flame, which the old light saw from their tombs, which they saw put out. That flame burns again for other soldiers far from home. Farther in heart than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tradedians and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones."

My Miss Merry Sunshine badge is still affixed to my lapel! 5 out of 5 stars.