Brideshead Revisited
I finished reading Brideshead Revisited yesterday. I wasn’t sure what I thought of it, and I’m still not. Some spoilers below the cut, but probably no more than you'd find in an average book review... if that makes sense.
Technically, it was a good book. It had that slightly bizarre style that I noticed in Wicked - most of it is very simply, matter-of-factly, written, but occasionally the author breaks out the metaphors and heads towards almost poetical territory. In Wicked, it seemed pretentious (to me), and got on my nerves. Here it works, mostly because the whole book is the memories of this man - Charles Ryder - and it’s the sort of thing the human mind does. Or at least, mine does.
The problem with it being just the memories of one man is that a lot of the character history is hearsay. There’s one rather dull section in which Charles recounts ten years of Julia’s life, when she has barely appeared in the book before and there are only hints as to her later importance. Also, the second half of the book contains nothing of Sebastian in person, only the news his sister brings back of him.
I liked Sebastian. That’s probably quite typical of me. He’s… broken, cliché as that sounds. He hates his family, hates his religion (Catholicism; more on this later), and he rejects the bits of the world he doesn’t like and holds onto things from his childhood instead. Like the teddy bear Aloysius. He does things on impulse, and he gets his own way, and his family always get him out of trouble. Usually by giving out money, to him or to others.
He becomes an alcoholic while at Oxford - he can’t have been more than about twenty. It’s sad - I found myself blaming his family, because it’s when he’s with them that he first starts to drink in a dangerous way. That’s probably not fair, though. I expect it would have happened anyway, even if they hadn’t been pushing him and trying to control him.
You never get to find out his real reasons for drinking - or, why, in the end, he turns to religion. That, for me, was unsatisfying, but only because I really like the character.
And then there’s Julia. Some things about her, or rather about her relationship with Charles, annoy me. Partly that Charles says Sebastian was ‘the forerunner’. He says it a couple of times, and once he seems convinced that the things he loved in Sebastian were just Julia’s qualities, but another time he says that he still loves him. The other thing is that Charles is self-sacrificing, at one point in particular, when it comes to Julia. What he does for her is quite a big thing, but he can’t give Sebastian any comfort at all. It’s not his fault, of course - he can’t be expected to look after an alcoholic, especially when that would mean working against his family.
Actually, I have a proper reason for preferring Sebastian to Julia. He has more depth. Julia’s character comes down to one thing, really: her struggle with Catholicism. Sebastian is more complex and intriguing.
About the Catholicism. I don’t quite think that the book had its intended effect. It was written by a Catholic, and yet at the end I pitied the Catholics. Only one of the family, the eldest son, seems to have a healthy relationship with religion. Julia sacrifices her happiness for a religion she’s only ever half believed; Sebastian turns to it, despite having always professed not to believe, when he has nothing else left (but he still drinks); Cordelia, their younger sister, is a failed nun who doesn’t really understand what she believes.
Charles, meanwhile, is agnostic. Although I’m closer to atheist than agnostic, I could empathise with him a lot of the time. One memorable bit is when he says ‘I only want to know what these people believe. They say it’s all based on logic.’ He finds that the various explanations given by the characters only show how little they know about their own religion, and the one character who does seem to know doesn’t manage to satisfy him. Whether he genuinely wants to understand or not, I have no idea. I know in that situation I’d have to really make myself take it seriously - I’m conditioned to be sceptical.
It reminded me of a couple of other books (and a film adaptation). All ones I like, so it must be a good thing. Most of all, The Line of Beauty. I think this was less becase of the gay undertones, and more because of the situation: a young man, through friendship with a fellow student, is brought into contact with a family very different from his own. Also, some of the ways they talked about and treated Sebastian reminded me of Cat, the bipolar daughter in The Line of Beauty.
The gay undertones - romantic friendship, more properly, I suppose, as it’s never very explicit - reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Charles and Sebastian have the same kind of relationship as Basil and Dorian, or possibly even Harry and Dorian. At least, it has the same tone to it, even if the circumstances are quite different.
It also reminded me of Atonement. I’ve only seen the film of this, and I think it’s mostly the fact that they’re set in roughly the same time period, and centre around upper-class families. Basically, Atonement is the only reference I have for the style of the period and the situation. Although the theme of thwarted love does appear in both, I suppose.
This got quite long, so I’m going to stop now, before I give too many spoilers (sorry). It is a good book, and I’m glad I bought a copy, because I think I’ll be looking back at it and trying to figure it out. I’m also definitely going to see the film. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.
Oh, but first of all, a quote. I'm not sure why I loved this passage so much, but I did:
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance - of Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked through the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-spltting speech.
Technically, it was a good book. It had that slightly bizarre style that I noticed in Wicked - most of it is very simply, matter-of-factly, written, but occasionally the author breaks out the metaphors and heads towards almost poetical territory. In Wicked, it seemed pretentious (to me), and got on my nerves. Here it works, mostly because the whole book is the memories of this man - Charles Ryder - and it’s the sort of thing the human mind does. Or at least, mine does.
The problem with it being just the memories of one man is that a lot of the character history is hearsay. There’s one rather dull section in which Charles recounts ten years of Julia’s life, when she has barely appeared in the book before and there are only hints as to her later importance. Also, the second half of the book contains nothing of Sebastian in person, only the news his sister brings back of him.
I liked Sebastian. That’s probably quite typical of me. He’s… broken, cliché as that sounds. He hates his family, hates his religion (Catholicism; more on this later), and he rejects the bits of the world he doesn’t like and holds onto things from his childhood instead. Like the teddy bear Aloysius. He does things on impulse, and he gets his own way, and his family always get him out of trouble. Usually by giving out money, to him or to others.
He becomes an alcoholic while at Oxford - he can’t have been more than about twenty. It’s sad - I found myself blaming his family, because it’s when he’s with them that he first starts to drink in a dangerous way. That’s probably not fair, though. I expect it would have happened anyway, even if they hadn’t been pushing him and trying to control him.
You never get to find out his real reasons for drinking - or, why, in the end, he turns to religion. That, for me, was unsatisfying, but only because I really like the character.
And then there’s Julia. Some things about her, or rather about her relationship with Charles, annoy me. Partly that Charles says Sebastian was ‘the forerunner’. He says it a couple of times, and once he seems convinced that the things he loved in Sebastian were just Julia’s qualities, but another time he says that he still loves him. The other thing is that Charles is self-sacrificing, at one point in particular, when it comes to Julia. What he does for her is quite a big thing, but he can’t give Sebastian any comfort at all. It’s not his fault, of course - he can’t be expected to look after an alcoholic, especially when that would mean working against his family.
Actually, I have a proper reason for preferring Sebastian to Julia. He has more depth. Julia’s character comes down to one thing, really: her struggle with Catholicism. Sebastian is more complex and intriguing.
About the Catholicism. I don’t quite think that the book had its intended effect. It was written by a Catholic, and yet at the end I pitied the Catholics. Only one of the family, the eldest son, seems to have a healthy relationship with religion. Julia sacrifices her happiness for a religion she’s only ever half believed; Sebastian turns to it, despite having always professed not to believe, when he has nothing else left (but he still drinks); Cordelia, their younger sister, is a failed nun who doesn’t really understand what she believes.
Charles, meanwhile, is agnostic. Although I’m closer to atheist than agnostic, I could empathise with him a lot of the time. One memorable bit is when he says ‘I only want to know what these people believe. They say it’s all based on logic.’ He finds that the various explanations given by the characters only show how little they know about their own religion, and the one character who does seem to know doesn’t manage to satisfy him. Whether he genuinely wants to understand or not, I have no idea. I know in that situation I’d have to really make myself take it seriously - I’m conditioned to be sceptical.
It reminded me of a couple of other books (and a film adaptation). All ones I like, so it must be a good thing. Most of all, The Line of Beauty. I think this was less becase of the gay undertones, and more because of the situation: a young man, through friendship with a fellow student, is brought into contact with a family very different from his own. Also, some of the ways they talked about and treated Sebastian reminded me of Cat, the bipolar daughter in The Line of Beauty.
The gay undertones - romantic friendship, more properly, I suppose, as it’s never very explicit - reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Charles and Sebastian have the same kind of relationship as Basil and Dorian, or possibly even Harry and Dorian. At least, it has the same tone to it, even if the circumstances are quite different.
It also reminded me of Atonement. I’ve only seen the film of this, and I think it’s mostly the fact that they’re set in roughly the same time period, and centre around upper-class families. Basically, Atonement is the only reference I have for the style of the period and the situation. Although the theme of thwarted love does appear in both, I suppose.
This got quite long, so I’m going to stop now, before I give too many spoilers (sorry). It is a good book, and I’m glad I bought a copy, because I think I’ll be looking back at it and trying to figure it out. I’m also definitely going to see the film. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.
Oh, but first of all, a quote. I'm not sure why I loved this passage so much, but I did:
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance - of Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked through the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-spltting speech.