Don't be so beastly! It's Brideshead time...

I am one of those weird people who has managed to live this far without ever seeing any of the 1981 TV series 'Brideshead Revisited'. Is that a record? How did it happen, you ask? Well, for a start I was at my weird Quaker boarding school in North Yorkshire when the series came out and we didn't get much TV access. All I watched in that period was 'Top of the Pops' and 'Fame' and I was really far more interested in Littlewoods own brand vodka and sexual experimentation than TV so I wasn't really bothered. Also I am not a fan of Jeremy 'stiff upper' Irons – men with those ridiculous plummy accents are just not my thing (I've tended to prefer the bit of rough...not nearly enough gamekeepers or...truck drivers in Brideshead) – and in general stories about toffs going to Oxford have always been low on my list of priorities, especially when I was younger. I have been a bit of an anti-snob snob in my time, I will admit it. These days I try to be more openminded and I am...most of the time. In the interests of fairness I will even try and incorporate as much Brideshead language as I can into this post. So, tally-ho, chaps, let's go hunting!

I did read some Evelyn Waugh years ago. I read 'Scoop' after uni mainly because I was very interested in journalism and journalists at the time (20 years ago now). I even fancied being a journalist but it wasn't for me – mainly because I am no good at recalling facts (which obviously means I would have made a great tabloid journalist but, you know, one has one's limits). I didn't even think of reading 'Brideshead Revisited' back then...it was SO not the kind of book I was interested in then (I was political, right, it was obviously all about FASCISTS!). Also I had just spent three years in Cambridge surrounded by spoilt rich kids of pretty much every persuasion (I'm a spoilt, dysfunctional middle class kid myself...a world apart you know) and so I was hardly in the mood for more of the same in print. I had been very disappointed to find that Oxbridge institutions were still so full of what we used to call Brideshead types when I was there (1986-9) - I had shown up naively expecting to find intelligent students from all over the country, from all kinds of backgrounds, all there on merit (silly one!). There were some people like that...but there were also heaps and heaps of rich Sloanes too – all talking bollocks about skiing, getting their CVs together for city careers, drinking Pimms and talking in those annoying bloody voices! I lived in the north east of England till I was sixteen...I didn't believe there were really that many Sloanes in the world! So many stripey shirts! After 3 years of “What's wrong – family no money?” (a bloke really did say that to a friend of mine) I was desperate to get away from 'Brideshead' world so I got on a National Express coach out of there as soon as I could. Once free I just kept going... further and further north...until it was just all like a very well-enunciated bad dream.

Now I'm older and wiser I can recognise that maybe I overreacted... just a tad. I'm sure at least some of those annoying Sloanes were nice people. And I could have enjoyed the pretty buildings more. Plus I still hadn't read the book...what did I know about a 'Brideshead' world?

Well, finally, twenty years later..I've just read 'Brideshead Revisited' (partly because at least one of you talked about it back at the reading list post on prose fiction). Not having seen the TV series at all means that I came to the book with no real idea of the story or the individual characters. I was as unprejudiced as a person who's not keen on rich, Southern toffs can be. I mean I never joined the Socialist Workers Party or anything (but mainly because I was too lazy...I'm not sure they'd have had me).

But the book...how did it go? How did I get on with Sebastian and Lady Julia and dear, dear Charles (Charles who is so plodding and ordinary and who only really comes alive when he meets the fabulous Flytes...when he's “discovered” by them)?

Well, let's see. I did really like some of the writing. Written in 1944-5 and first published in 1945, it is a marvellous period piece (with most of the action set in the 1920s and 30s...capturing, as Waugh saw it, the last era when beauty could flourish, the time before English society went to the dogs, got common and lost all its sheen). Of course English society only looked remotely sheeny back then if you were looking from the top end down – nothing particularly beautiful about the life of a 1920s parlourmaid, I don't imagine, and this is no 'Gosford Park' – anyone who isn't above stairs is of very little interest in this tale. Halt, I tell a lie – there is Nanny, darling Nanny...always knitting, very stupid. And there's Lunt, Charles' Oxford scout (or cleaner). Lunt spends a lot of time wiping up the sick of rich young men and that much has not changed...when I was at Cambridge we still had bedders (Oxford has scouts, Cambridge bedders...ra, ra bloody, ra) and they still spent most of their time wiping up sick...and urine. One morning I remember finding the bedder from our floor (a woman in her sixties) in tears because a group of rugger lads and got pissed and then pissed all over the carpet outside the door of a geeky guy they didn't like. The great and good? Sometimes I remember why I didn't like it there very much. Privilege does not always bring out the best in people.

Still, back to the book! There are some lovely pictures of that (in some ways) innocent time and some lovely lines. “I happen to like this bad set,” says Charles when he has broken free from the “middle course of culture” and found a group of new outrageous, fairly gay, society friends (with Sebastian the jewel in its big camp crown). “I like getting drunk at luncheon...I usually have a glass of champagne about this time. Will you join me?” His conventional cousin Jasper is unimpressed. Jasper is not interested in “an enclosed and enchanted garden”, in art or in beauty, in falling in love with pretty golden boys (as Charles..and Evelyn Waugh both did as part of their university education).

There are some gorgeous words too...Charles' father “footles about collecting things”, “crapulous” makes more than one appearance, modern art is “bosh”, EVERYTHING is “beastly” at one point or another, the trains abroad are full of “peasants” (honestly, these days, you call someone a peasant and they just overreact, innit?). Charles undergoes a “conversion to the Baroque” at Brideshead (the big fancy country house) and, I suppose, we readers are meant to be seduced along with him. It is tempting...the servants, the richness of everything, the grounds, the fancy bathrooms, life being one big long cocktail party. Who wouldn't weaken..? What would you rather have - egalitarianism? Oh, that's just...well...so beastly, darling. Let's not even think about it.

Overall the book is just so sad though...in the ways it is meant to be and a few more besides. All that money, the beautiful house and...yet so miserable. Yes, I know that's kind of the point but still...whiney really-quite-vacuous Sebastian drinking himself even more stupid, silly really-quite-vacuous Julia making disastrous man choices, tiresome Lady Marchmain weighing everyone down with restrictive religious mumbo jumbo that only makes them miserable (oh for god's sake, if you're going to be rich, just enjoy the bloody money, why can't you!). Then there's zombie-like Charles following them all about like a lovesick schoolboy...and lovesick for what? That miserable annoying bunch of layabouts! Pot/kettle I know but still I really did struggle to give a flying fig about any of these characters. It was only some of the great lines and little details that kept me reading as Sebastian got drunk (yet again) and Julia pouted and tossed her hair (yet again) and Charles thought about how brilliant they all were (yet again).

The feature of the book that confused me most of all was Lady Marchmain. At the beginning you think she is going to be a significant character (“She sucks their blood” says the delightfully outrageous Anthony Blanche of Lady Marchmain's relationship with the rest of the family and you think...oh goody, here's the drama) but then she is hardly in the book at all. I saw a trailer for the new 'Brideshead' film (out this year, I presume) and again the trailer made the mother of Bridey*, Sebastian, Julia and Cordelia look like a central character but if she is they must have written her a few extra scenes. I know Waugh tells us she is formidable, a great force in the family but we don't really see or hear it in the book. I know there is the whole religious question but to me that all felt forced and laid on top of the other better writing –somehow getting in its way. It also felt so like the work of a new convert (as Waugh was to Catholicism) trying to persuade us all how clearly his was the true way. It was an odd way to do it though (aren't converts always a little overzealous?) as to me he just showed Catholicism as cruel, unfair, inconsiderate and a bit..well...fluffy and silly at times. Is that really the way to win round the infidels? I know... let's force an old man to convert on his deathbed. See, told you God was good. That's not going to do it for me, I have to say.

Likewise how are we supposed to believe for one second that daft old Charles does eventually see the good way to paradise? Just because he doesn't get his girl? Because the chapel is so pretty? Is this the same character who earlier on sees his best friend (and first love) broken by the pressures of the family and its church of choice? “ 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember,'” says Sebastian in the early, happier section of the book. He never does though. He just rots...in fact he rusts like a drunk...

Much as a lot of my favourite lines were the throwaway ones, most of my favourite characters were the minor ones – gruff Lex, adventurous Anthony (“a byword of iniquity”), Lord Marchmain (who abandons the charade of society and hides out in Venice with a dancer) and most of all Charles's father, Ned Ryder. I almost wanted to read another book about all their stories and forget the silly Flytes. Ned Ryder, for example, is not a major character by any stretch but the way he treats his son (as a nuisance) really did make me laugh (a bitter kind of laugh but a laugh all the same). Charles comes home for Xmas and his father does everything he can to get him to jolly well bugger off again. There was a refreshing honesty in that – these days we're all supposed to like our families...well, really. Poppycock. Likewise Anthony, for me, has some of the best lines - “'English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals'”, he says towards the end of the book and whilst English snobbery is not what it was it's still something the English enjoy excelling in a little much for my liking. I'm with Anthony, all the way.

Overall this book was not a great reading event for me - I expected more somehow. In the end I felt it provided a few laughs, some clever commentary, more than its fair share of prettiness but plenty of stomach-turning too, plenty of sloppy thinking and propaganda. If you believe what you read on the holy pages of wikipedia Waugh wanted us to feel the “atmosphere of a better age” in 'Brideshead Revisited', to see what we were losing and feel its loss and I suppose it is the nostalgia factor that has ensured the story's continued success. Pretty buildings and cruise liners aside though I finished the book, put it down and thought 'do you know, maybe things aren't so bad these days after all...'








* This made me laugh every time I read it as a 'bridie' round here is a pasty filled with steak mince. Quite apt really.