Susan's Reviews's Reviews > Brideshead Revisited

Read this one years ago. I remember thinking, after reading this book, that the British were really too hung up on religion. Charles Ryder was an atheist at heart, but became a Catholic later on (more, I believe, because of his hopeless love for Julia Marchmain than because of any real religious fervour). Charles was enchanted by Sebastian's dramatics, his eccentric lifestyle and all of the beautiful things he surrounded himself with. Sebastian's biggest flaw was his heavy drinking, which he blamed on his strictly religious mother and her constant attempts to control him.



I suspected that Charles wished he could trade places with Sebastian and envied him his exotic life. But ironically, Sebastian ends up in self-imposed exile in a leper colony in Africa at the finish of the novel. Julia is trapped by her religion in her loveless marriage to a high ranking politician, and Charles is unhappy in his own marriage with Celia. Everyone in this novel appeared, at first, to be willing to be ready to give everything up for love, but they all ended up finding that their social roles, their religious upbringing - or whatever!- prevented them from choosing personal happiness over their social or religious obligations.



I remember wondering if Charles ever regretted meeting Sebastian at Oxford, but then Charles himself said that life really only began for him at Oxford AFTER he met Charles. All those poor, discontented people! I enjoyed this novel very much, but kept pitying all the poor choices that these characters made - or felt forced to settle for.



N.B. I find it interesting that Waugh later regretted writing this novel. In a letter to another author, he wrote:

""I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled......
It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful."

Well, the rest of the literary world might beg to differ!
(I found this quote quite humorous - it reminded me of when I recently I found an old copy of my high school year book and cringed at my awful, melodramatic submissions of poetry that had been published there - Yikes!)

(There is an excellent 1981 Granada Television series staring Jeremy Irons which did a great job of adapting this novel into a series. I haven't seen the 2008 adaptation. Not sure anything can top the 1981 adaptation.)