Book Review: Brideshead Revisited

I wasn't looking forward to this one. I began to read it with very low expectations and for about the first third it met them. A story of upper-class twits, one of them - in his late teens - still in love with his teddy-bear, dissipating their small talents in drinking and carousing and gazing into their navels about their dysfunctional families. Yuk. And on top of that the narrator, from an almost normal background, held in thrall to the awful owners of the country pile.

Then something happened. It may have been nothing more than the train journey. In the past I've noticed that when I'm struggling with a novel it pays to carve out some time to sit and read it in large chunks - all the way through in a single sitting if possible - and that if I can do this, somehow I get into the book no matter how unappealing I find the subject. Doesn't always work, but on the whole it's far more successful than reading in ten minute nibbles, as I do if I'm waiting in the car park for Nikki to leave work. So this train journey - one of the increasingly rare occasions where I'm called to Westminster and therefore have to endure more than four hours train travel for a ninety minute meeting - enabled me to finish the last two thirds of the book in two sittings.

While it's still not a book I would have chosen to read, except insofar as it's one of those "famous" novels that it's always nice to be able to say one has read, I did end up enjoying it once they got into the adultery. I still didn't manage to conjure up any sympathy for any of the characters. For the most part their misery is self-inflicted. But maybe that's the point Waugh was trying to make. Or one of them, at least.

One thing is certain: books like this make for very interesting and lively debate at the club meetings as there's always a healthy mix of people who enjoyed it or didn't, and almost as many different interpretations of the hidden meanings as there are people at the meeting. If you're interested in a description of how the outwardly ostentatious world of the landed gentry in the years between the two World Wars hides a series of broken dreams and borderline psychoses then this is the book for you. From what I've heard, I personally would have got on a lot better with almost any of Waugh's other works.