The English as a people
must now be reckoned mentally incapacitated from a surfeit of royal babies and
costume dramas. Brideshead Revisited is
one of those books which like those of Jane Austen is now only read because it
is the script for wide and small screen country house productions. By the end
of reading it you will know a lot about what everyone wears and about interior
furnishings; the script is very detailed and seeing it on screen requires less effort. Over the years, since its publication
in 1945, it's been a good money spinner.
Brideshead
Revisited is also a book about a world where everyone thinks it
possible to have their cake and eat it, and thus fits neatly with our contemporary
English incapacitation. They may not always succeed, but much of the time they
do not suffer (or suffer very much) for things which would be fatal to the
little people on whose labour their lives depend. There will always be someone around
to get you out of a scrape, and if money is needed to lubricate the
extrication or soften the blow, well, there is an awful lot of it about. As for religion, it’s Roman
Catholicism and that is particularly accommodating, providing both terrifying
rhetoric and obliging side-deals. It is against divorce, but if you have the
necessary, an annulment can be
arranged. Adultery merely requires that appearances be kept up. As for homosexuality,
well, you simply condemn and turn a blind eye, or condemn and join in. When it comes to writing a fiction based on
the fact, it’s very simple. You let the reader know what you are on about but
you don’t do anything as tasteless as dwell on the fact. (I discover that this has
provided scope for critical debates about whether the book is “about” a
homosexual relationship between Sebastian and Charles, thus casting it into the
dire category of books written in code. I found myself impatient with the book
because it was so obviously coded, and not only because of the censorship
priorities applied by London publishers back in 1945 but probably also because coyness may have been the only way the author could handle his material. The London censorship priorities
are, of course, different now).
There is an extravagant
death bed scene, which according to taste is either very well done or simply de trop. From a structural point of
view, the interesting thing is that Waugh selects for the death bed not one of
his major characters but the relatively minor pater familias. The mother of the family, who plays a much larger part
in the narrative, is despatched with no mise
en scène. The novel thus ends on a fittingly patriarchal note, the death of
the father which re-arranges everyone’s future and re-establishes the order of things. And the priest is very happy with his three pounds, the price of sending pater to heaven after a lifetime of having his cake and eating it (page 318).
There are some passages
which I found funny, and some very well-written. The book was composed and published in England at a time (1944 - 1945) when the
little people were preparing to
install, by a landslide of unprecedented scale, a socialist government. It was written, as they say, against the current and, of course, deliberately so. Nothing much has changed there when you think of the royal babies and the perennial costume dramas.
