But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.”
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is an absorbing, beautifully written book about love, loss, religion, longing, and the dying English aristocracy. The narrator is Charles Ryder, who reflects on his years connected to the Flytes, an aristocratic but dysfunctional family. Charles initially meets the family through his Oxford classmate Sebastian, one of the sons. Sebastian is beautiful, charismatic, and as written, undoubtedly gay. While never consummated in any way, it is clear Charles and he fall in love. Sebastian brings Charles to Brideshead, his family estate, and they share many idyllic moments, although Sebastian suggests some alienation from his family by calling Brideshead where his family lives, and not his home.
Over time, Charles meets the rest of the family. There is sister Julia, who looks like Sebastian and initially gives the impression of slight contempt, Brideshead the oldest who is stodgy and traditionally religious, Cordelia the youngest who is forthright and affectionate. The mother, Lady Marchmain, lives on the estate separated from her husband, Lord Marchmain, who fled Brideshead and lives abroad. The family is fractured, but also intimately tied to one another.
When the book starts, it is many years later after Charles’s initial meeting with Sebastian. It is World War II and Charles and his troops come to occupy Brideshead as part of their encampment. Charles reminisces about his time at Brideshead and the Flyte family, looking back through a golden nostalgia, but also with sorrow for things that have passed.
Waugh always said Brideshead Revisited was fundamentally about religion. The Flytes were raised by their deeply Catholic mother, and there is even a small chapel on the grounds. The mother on the surface seems kind and long suffering, but she is also highly manipulative, using religion to control her family. Over time, Sebastian becomes a severe alcoholic, and his interactions with his mother have the veneer of care, but she both tries to control Sebastian’s drinking while simultaneously undermining him by offering alcohol at random times. She visits the chapel every day to pray, but her form of Catholicism seems oppressive. The father was not religious, which is part of his fracture with his wife.
Over time, Charles falls in love with Sebastian’s sister Julia, but he calls Sebastian the “forerunner” to Julia; the deep love he has for Sebastian, even as Sebastian becomes dissolute and soon wanders abroad, unrooted from the family, is threaded throughout the entire work. Julia and Charles have a passionate, all consuming love, but are married to other people. While Charles easily divorces his wife (who is happy to see him go, as disconnected as he is from her), Julia is tormented by the sin of remarriage without an annulment, and the consequences of her pain shake the couple.
The character of Charles is curious. On one hand, he expresses deep love for Sebastian and Julia and close connection with the family in general (his own relationship with his father fraught and distanced), on the other he seems like a somewhat colorless witness. I felt that he was afraid to live his life in some way, content to live through the Flytes and be carried along by their members. The book is riveting, though, and the prose is compelling, evocative, and lovely. I really loved this book and hope to read more of Waugh’s work.