Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited is a damn near perfect novel, yet I'm nearly at lost to describe it right now. It's a twentieth century tragedy, a medieval yet modern love story, a tale of agonizing guilt, of sincere religion and false atheism, a tale of loss - and yet, through all this, possessing exactly the kind of joi de vivre that a novel like Netherland (from yesterday's post) lacks.

It is, simply, both a coming-of-age and a nostalgia piece: a monumental flashback in which an officer near the end of WWII looks back on the days of his youth and the time he spent at the great estate Brideshead and with the family who inhabited it. Charles Ryder, as he's called, finds himself encamped at this very estate with his army regiment, and this proximity incites the tale that follows. He recalls his student days at Oxford, where he falls in with Sebastian Flyte, an effete young member of the British aristocracy. Sebastian introduces Charles to his family, and so for a number of years Charles becomes wrapped up in their affairs - affairs that seem both sordid and mundane, and which gallop over fifteen years and three continents.

The novel succeeds based largely on two strengths: its characters and its writing. In Charles Ryder, Waugh has created an unflappable, deeply sympathetic narrator, who - though he rarely allows himself to be thrown off balance, manages to be a true friend and unjudging ally. In Sebastian Flyte - Ryder's foil, as unhinged as Ryder is stable - Waugh paints a sensitive portrait of a tragic life: Sebastian is always engaging, whether he's parading at Oxford, or in his cups in a European hovel. Sebastian's sister Julia is inscrutable for the first half of the novel and then, suddenly, she opens to the reader just as she opens to Charles. Their mother is less monster and more well-intended matriarch; their father and brother affable, if opposite, caricatures of mid-century British aristocracy.

They're just all so damned sympathetic.

And the writing - god, the writing. Waugh is lyrical without being showy, and he saves his sharpest observations for dialogue, which manages to be both authentic and revelatory. His meditations on religion, politics, guilt, wealth, and sexuality seem right at home in the mouths of his characters... perhaps because his characters are so well drawn in the first place. And when Waugh gives Charles, Julia, and his reader the kind of fulfillment for which they've been longing, adrift on a stormy Atlantic, he is... well, masterful:

At sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime-flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature - now, while they waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.