A review by slippy_underfoot
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

4.0

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I’m very glad I finally got round to this. It’s a novel heavy with nostalgia—some of it earned, some rather self-inflicted—but the writing is so elegant and the mood so well sustained that it carries you along easily.

Charles is a shifty narrator—sometimes sharply perceptive, sometimes plainly blinkered—and his fascination with the Flyte family is equal parts romantic, aesthetic, and slightly parasitic. But that’s part of the point, I think. Waugh doesn’t offer him up for full admiration.

The book is at its best when it leans into its sense of faded glamour: grand houses with their edges crumbling, friendships veering between intimacy and manipulation, the feeling of life being something already half-lost. It’s rich and a bit mannered, but knowingly so. And there are flashes of real emotional sharpness that catch you off guard.

There’s a fair amount of religious agonising, which didn’t move me particularly, but it’s all of a piece with the novel’s broader themes—devotion, decay, impossible yearning.

Aside from a few sequences which flag a little, it’s beautifully done. 

Thoughtful, often funny, and quietly sad.