“When I reached ‘C’ Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”

I went into this read with some trepidation.  I had some experience with books set in this time period of the early to mid-1900s and I haven’t found them very edifying:  The Good Soldier, Testament of Youth, The Great Gatsby, etc. There is some sort of depressing pall that seems to have affected the world after the First World War and authors appear to have contracted an especially virulent dose of it.  Nevertheless, I thought I would give Waugh and try and see if he could surprise me.

The book is broken up into three parts, including a prologue and an epilogue.  In the first part, we meet the narrator, Charles Ryder.  With only his reticent father for family, Charles comes to Oxford, perhaps looking for a deeper connection and finds it in Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain and whose ancestral home is Brideshead.  But at present, Lord Marchmain is living in Italy, separated from his wife whose staunch Catholicism made him convert and later make this break from his family.  Sebastain’s brother and sister, Brideshead and Cordelia, follow in their mother’s religious footsteps, but sister Julia breaks the yoke and forges her own lapsed path.

In part one, Et In Arcadia Ego, Charles is entranced with the family and rather obsessed with Sebastian, in spite of Sebastian’s lukewarm connection to his mother and siblings.  At school, they are inseparable, nearly to the point of being isolated from others.

Hertford College, Oxford
source Wikipedia

In part two, Brideshead Deserted, Charles decides a studious life is not for him and he leaves school to become a painter.  Sebastian becomes a thrall to the bottle and his raging alcholism somewhat worries the family.  Julia marries a businessman who promises a lukewarm Catholic conversion to please the family.  When Lady Marchmain is on her deathbed, Charles is enlisted to find Sebastian to bring him home, but Sebastian callously refuses.  Later, the family learns that his alcoholism has somehow driven him to a monastery, of all places.

Part three, entitled A Twitch Upon a Thread, moves along at quite a pace.  Suddenly we find that Charles has married but has been absent for two years, painting.  His wife meets him upon his return and we learn that he has two children, one of whom he has never seen.  Upon meeting Julia again, and in spite of never before having an attraction towards her or even an emotional attachment, and vice versa, all of a sudden they are obsessed with each other.  Charles refused to return home, even to see his children. He has no interest in them. This is all okay, however, because his wife, Celia, had an affair (I think when he was absent for two years painting) and Charles is fine with ruining the lives of his children and dumping his wife, who quickly finds someone else. Everyone can get a divorce and re-marry, of course.

Madresfield Court, inspiration for Brideshead
source Wikimedia Commons

But lo! Lord Marchmain returns, and in spite of being opposed to religion, has an obscure deathbed conversion, which causes a cataclysmic domino effect: our atheist Charles, suddenly realizes the importance of faith, Julia suddenly returns to her faith (which we’ve never seen her practice) and decides to leave, as now it’s apparent that she cannot marry Charles (the first sensible thing these characters have done in the whole book).

Apparently Waugh meant the book to convey, “…. the operation of Grace, that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.” It’s a great idea but would have been more deftly conveyed if the characters acted in ways that were believable and the reader wasn’t left to fill in large chunks of the story, being puzzled as to how certain characters got from a to b. I didn’t feel like any of the characters displayed a love of God or even, less importantly, a love for each other.  It was like I was watching pieces on a chessboard, often making incorrect moves, or moves that were entirely puzzling.

Madresfield Court, inspiration for Brideshead
source Wikimedia Commons

Will I read more of Waugh’s works?  Possibly.  In spite of his cock-eyed creation of this novel, his writing is lyrically dense and definitely draws the reader along.  However, I am glad that I’m finished with this one.