Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
by Evelyn Waugh
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Book Reviews of Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Book Review: Family Collapse
Summary: 4 Stars
Charles Ryder, an English soldier, arrives in the middle of the night at the new home of his troops. They are to be stationed at an old country estate. When Charles awakens the next morning, he is surprised to find that he recognizes the place--it is Brideshead, a place with which he was very familiar during his college days. His best friend's family lived there, and Charles descends into memories of the friendship and the collapse of his friend's family.
Sebastian Flyte is unlike anyone Charles has known. He is glamorous and cultured, moody and outrageous. He meets Charles accidentally in their first year at Oxford, and the two become nearly inseparable. Charles is dazzled by his friend and, despite Sebastian's irritation, he ends up becoming close to the rest of the family, too. Sebastian's father is living abroad in scandal with his mistress. Sebastian's mother is at home, clinging to her Roman Catholic faith and worrying about her children. Sebastian's older brother is proper and largely disapproving of Sebastian, but his two sisters love him a great deal.
Every member of the family is affected by their Catholic upbringing, and they are fascinated by Charles, who is an atheist.
As Sebastian begins to feel smothered by his family, he starts drinking heavily. The more he drinks, the more his family tries to keep him under control, to pull him back to the family fold, and this ends up pushing him even more quickly into alcoholism.
In the second part of the book, Charles examines his relationship with Sebastian's sister, Julia, and the two of them observe as the family completely disintegrates.
I really liked the intricate examination of the family, and the ways they interacted with each other, and also the ways that they presented themselves in society. I liked Charles and Sebastian's relationship in the first part of the book, and the ways they balanced each other. I also really liked Charles' father and the quiet war they fought when Charles came home from college penniless for his vacation.
In the second part of the book, it was much more difficult for me to relate to or to like Charles very much. He'd descended into someone so shallow, who was only interested in his own pleasures and ambitions, and who abandoned his family for little reason. Julia, also, became annoying, especially toward the end when she was rediscovering her faith. The characters, so bright and lively at the beginning of the story, became duller toward the end.
Book Review: Passion Thwarted
Summary: 5 Stars
This is not THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS AND HOW THEY GREW, but it is close. An outsider, Charles Ryder, (a near orphan), is befriended by a family, Lord and Lady Marchmain and their children, Bridey, Julia, Sebastian, and Cordelia. Of particular importance to the progression of the story are Sebastian and Julia.
Published in the United States in 1945, the novel has enduring interest as witnessed by the television mini-series and the movie. A contemporary reviewer noted that Waugh was writing at the top of his form, that the book was mature Waugh. The description of the art noveau style decoration of the chapel at Brideshead Castle is priceless.
Waugh uses a bundle of qualities to typify the major characters. That is to say, they stand for this and that, and may be visualised in such and such a way. And, as in so much of Waugh, the reader is shown the characters in action, they speak at great length, exhaustively. There are embedded first-person narratives, that of Charles Ryder in the outer ring, addressing the reader, and Anthony Blanche speaking to Charles at length, for example.
The reader need not be concerned that there is nothing funny in the volume under review, because there is. The portrait of Charles Ryder's father endeavoring to diversify Charles's evenings at home during the vacation is one of many instances of merriment. When Charles spends part of the same vacation with Sebastian Flyte, the author describes youth as langorous, generous.
Unfortunately the golden days of Charles and Sebastian don't last. Sebastian is sent down from Oxford and Charles goes to seek preparation for his career in the visual arts. When Charles is dismissed from Brideshead by Sebastian's mother he feels that he is entering reality. Charles leaves with an understanding the banishment is to last forever.
When his mother, Lady Marchmain, is dying, Charles sets out for Morocco in search of Sebastian. Sebastian is withered by drink. Charles arranges for Sebastian's brother Bridey to give him an allowance. Charles receives a commission to paint the house at Brideshead, his first.
Both Sebastian and Julia return to the practice of religion, Catholicism. The return has many consequences to their own lives and the life of Charles.
The book is both witty and good.
Book Review: average novel seduces critics
Summary: 2 Stars
The story has been summarized before: from an army camp, Charles Ryder reminisces about his youthful passion for a young aristocrat, Lord Flyte, and his subsequent passion for Lord's Flyte's sister, who has much in her of the young man - meaning she looks a lot like him.
Let me dispel a few misconceptions. First, that this is a masterpiece of style:
it ain't. the style is pedestrian, efficient in a workaday manner. There are no arresting phrases, no memorable scenes. When the emotional temper of the story rises, the author piles on a lot of qualifiers, but it all seems rather contrived, as if he was trying to get himself pumped up.
Second: that it is a brilliant portrayal of a declining aristocracy: yes, there is some of that. It is done, however, in passing, with rushed asides. There is no sustained exploration. In fact, the novel is laughably thin on framing a sense of the age in which it lives. Contemporary references are done by piling on lines of dialogue, mainly lines from Rex's oafish friends. That is cheap theatrical technique, done by someone who is merely trying to imply profundities, and not go into the trouble of actually writing them.
Third: that it is a deep exploration of religious faith, or the loss thereof. Phew. I have a question for those who say that: have you read Dostoevsky or even Graham Greene? Read Greene if you want a much deeper understanding of Catholicism in our world. The brief remarks on religion in this book are laughably simplistic: again, allusions, hints at a greater meaning, paths sketched but not followed through. What is the meaning of Julia's hysterical crisis? Can you read that and wonder where it came from?
About Sebastian. Of course he was gay. Why was he caring for the German? Just out of friendship? We don't know if Ryder was, but the narrator calls Sebastian the forerunner of his love for Julia. What does that mean?
As a novel, this is rather boring. Nothing much happens. There are a lot of re-tellings of events. Narration consists of a number of dialogues. It seems to be mainly about upper class and upper middle class young men who wanted to have sex with each other, but didn't. Classic.
Book Review: Irresistable Tides of Change....
Summary: 5 Stars
Evelyn Waugh's complex 1944 novel "Brideshead Revisited" defies easy description. On one level, it is the recollections of middle-aged British Army Captain Charles Ryder, whose unit is to be garrisoned at the vacant English estate of Brideshead during the Second World War. This present tense Ryder frames the beginning and ending of the novel. The bulk of the story is inbetween, as a younger Ryder narrates his life before the war, in which he becomes involved with the wealthy Catholic family that owns Brideshead.
At university, the young Ryder is befriended by his fascinating fellow student Sebastian, flamboyant, hard-drinking, and probably infatuated with Ryder in a way that Ryder does not quite recognize. They embark on a series of adventures that include an introduction to Sebastian's disfunctional family, the Marchmains. Ryder's relationship with Sebastian, and a later and very different relationship with Sebastian's sister Julia, make him both observer and participant in the family's trials.
The plot is a slow-roller, and early on, the reader is apt to be carried along by Waugh's wonderfully delicious prose, alternately funny and sad, describing Britain between the two World Wars. Halfway through, the plot makes a dramatic jump in time and exposition, as Ryder suddenly is married, with children, and a successful but unhappy artist returning from a stint in South America. The novel's themes come together in painful juxposition. Britain is drawn into a second world war that will end the days of empire, while the Marchmain family's Catholic faith seems to both undercut their possibilities of happiness while sustaining them through tragedy. The major players, well-drawn by Waugh, are alike in their imperfect but very real humanity.
"Brideshead Revisited" is very highly recommended as a classic novel of an England now gone but once as vivid and fascinating as Evelyn Waugh's undoubted writing gifts can make it.
Book Review: The Passing of a Unique Generation
Summary: 5 Stars
Waugh has given the modern reader a true as possible glimpse into the English aristocracy of the 20' and 30's. He admits that the novel was semi-auto-biographical, as he writes in 1959:
"It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the 16th century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity."
These old English mansions and the `culture' that lived within its walls unfortunately were and are, close to extinction. So for Waugh, he felt passionately compelled to write this book for future generations.
Lord Marchmain's patriarchal hold on his family was immense: rules of aristocratic society and the Catholic church's dogmas, at times, contradicted each other, which in turn ruined many lives during that period. This I believe is the essence of the novel, prompting the reader to ponder man-made laws and rules (whether church or state) that do indeed change with the times.
Sebastian is my favourite character: eccentric, playful, creative, intelligent and a hopeless alcoholic. Some reader's have suggested that his latent homosexuality, his religious belief's, and the guilt this imposed on his conscience, was the cause, in the end, of his drinking himself to death. This may be true. But as another reviewer has written, all the characters in this novel are terribly complex, and to make such a diagnosis may be too hasty, premature, and needs further discussion.
For some modern readers this novel may seem dated or irrelevant. However Waugh gives a little insight into the life and times of a culture that has passed into history.
Excellent reading.