Let's Read: "Brideshead Revisited" (Part I - Preliminaries)

God, the old saying goes, works in mysterious ways. Nevertheless, in Brideshead Revisited (1945), Evelyn Waugh's best-known masterpiece, the Man Upstairs really tops himself. Presented as the memoirs of a dispirited, disillusioned man looking back nostalgically on his lost youth and his failed love affairs, Brideshead chronicles the dissolution of a family of aristocratic Catholics in the years between the two World Wars, and how, ultimately, it was all part of God's plan. The novel's overt religiosity, unapologetic reactionism, and intense sensuality (in the literal sense of the term), left a lot of critics—and even, to some extent, the author himself—befuddled, put off, even outraged. No doubt many would have preferred Waugh to have gone on writing the anarchic satires that had made him a critical success during the 1930s, such as Vile Bodies and Scoop. In Brideshead, he seemed to be getting serious. Not only that, but serious about pretty unfashionable subjects: not only was he talking about religion and class, but he was saying all the "wrong" things about them. This new novel must have seemed to many like a major turning point in Waugh's career.

A superficial reading of his books support this, but take a serious look at Waugh's oeuvre and you'll see that such a view, like modern art, is all "great bosh." Brideshead Revisited may show us a civilization in decline, but its view of the future is positively giddy compared to the ones presented in Vile Bodies or A Handful of Dust. And if Brideshead is more serious than Waugh's earlier novels (and that rather depends on your definition of "serious"), it's also uproarious at times, just like the novels that followed, such as the Sword of Honour trilogy.

At any rate, it looks like Brideshead will stand the test of time. Both Time Magazine and the Modern Library placed it in their top-100 novels lists. Time didn't rank the books, but the Modern Library placed it at #80; a poll among readers put it at #88. Lingering questions about the novel's portrayal of homosexuality have been one focus of recent criticism on the novel, and occasional adaptations (a 2008 film and a superior 1981 television serial) have kept public interest in it alive as well.

Of course, chances are, if you're like most people, you aren't too worried about Brideshead as it stands within the context of Waugh's other works; indeed, if you're like most people, you haven't ever read Brideshead Revisited. That's all right; you don't need to have. We're going to read it now, piece by piece. And by "now," I mean whenever you happen to stumble across this hub and have time set aside for the book. It's my hope that my "Let's Read Brideshead Revisited" series will function like a virtual book club: one where you can read the book at your leisure, come on over at your leisure, and comment on it at your leisure. It's really all about leisure.

The next "Let's Read Brideshead" hub will feature a discussion of the Prologue (we'll also discuss Waugh's preface to the 1960 re-edition). I plan to make it through the whole book in six installments, including this one. Please feel free to say or ask whatever you want about the book, whether you liked it or not, as we go along.

One final note: who am I? I'm a first-year graduate student in literature at a small Texas university. My qualifications for writing on Waugh? I like him. A lot. I like Waugh more than Waugh did, which is saying something.