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annegreen 's review for:
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
On the back of my copy of the book, a quote from a review in The Independent states that this story "has exerted a powerful hold on the British imagination for more than sixty years ...". I'm not British, but it's certainly done that for me. Inspired to re-read it by having recently read Philip Eade's excellent biography of Evelyn Waugh, it was a nostalgic return to a world that's always captivated me. Fittingly, as the story itself is a nostalgic return to a once enchanted world . This edition of Brideshead also included a preface by the author written in 1959, hardly contemporary in terms of literary commentary, but fascinating by virtue of the author's objective look back at his original 1945 conception. In this he confesses his theme was "perhaps presumptuously large" but nevertheless refuses to apologise for it. He also notes that the climate of wartime privation in which he wrote prompted him to infuse the book with a certain gastronomic "gluttony". Being a lover of gastronomy I had no complaint about his lyrical depictions of food and wine, even if at times they verged on a kind of Rick Steinian flamboyance. In line with a number of later reviews, he admits that he "piled it on rather" and his prose often succumbed to self-indulgence, the tortured metaphor - what today would be condemned as 'purple prose'. Then again, one person's 'purple prose' is music to the ears of another more poetically inclined reader. It can be a fine line, but that's another argument.
With its unashamed preoccupation with an aristocratic and elitist world view, it has, like the author himself been derided for its snobbishness. I don't think this detracts from the work and should be read for what it is - the reconstruction of a certain time and a certain society, archaic now and politically incorrect in the extreme, but not an elegy as some have claimed. To me it seems simply a factual rendering of a particular world and the characters that inhabited it, and while they are unashamedly snobbish, is this a reason to condemn the rendering?
While every character is vividly and masterfully wrought, the most compelling, at least for me, was Brideshead itself. Here, in the description of the protagonist's first idyllic summer at Brideshead, to complain of over-gilding is to quibble, surely.
"It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes ..."
and then again, towards the end, looking back -
"... the prospect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier’s dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in the desert and the jackal-haunted nights."
While some critics don't consider this a brilliant book, it's generally regarded as Waugh's finest and certainly most memorable. A large part of what makes it so, I think, is that rather like Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden", it conjures up magic. A magic that may resonate with faithful fans like me, but sadly wasn't strong enough to dispel the angst of the emotionally tortured souls who inhabited it.
With its unashamed preoccupation with an aristocratic and elitist world view, it has, like the author himself been derided for its snobbishness. I don't think this detracts from the work and should be read for what it is - the reconstruction of a certain time and a certain society, archaic now and politically incorrect in the extreme, but not an elegy as some have claimed. To me it seems simply a factual rendering of a particular world and the characters that inhabited it, and while they are unashamedly snobbish, is this a reason to condemn the rendering?
While every character is vividly and masterfully wrought, the most compelling, at least for me, was Brideshead itself. Here, in the description of the protagonist's first idyllic summer at Brideshead, to complain of over-gilding is to quibble, surely.
"It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes ..."
and then again, towards the end, looking back -
"... the prospect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier’s dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in the desert and the jackal-haunted nights."
While some critics don't consider this a brilliant book, it's generally regarded as Waugh's finest and certainly most memorable. A large part of what makes it so, I think, is that rather like Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden", it conjures up magic. A magic that may resonate with faithful fans like me, but sadly wasn't strong enough to dispel the angst of the emotionally tortured souls who inhabited it.