Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

I wasn't expecting to like this book an awful lot after my Fitzgerald fatigue a few years ago. I thought to myself 'how much more of the disasters inflicted by the social elite can I take?' The opening pages are laborious and stuffily written, but things freshen up when the protagonist Charles Ryder begins narrating his history proper. The story is about the early, halcyon Oxford days of Ryder and his upper class pal Sebastian, whom he falls into 'enchantment' with. He is introduced to his sprawling country estate, glamorous lifestyle, and dysfunctional family, the Flytes. Young Sebastian enjoys a tipple and proceeds to become an alcoholic, or dipsomaniac, as it's referred to in the book. Charles' affections ultimately shift from the brother to the sister, Julia, with which a love affair is formed.

The book is written as a nostalgic love letter for the upper classes and luxurious lives they led before the collapse of the aristocracy after World War II. As such there are overblown, sentimental passages that mar an otherwise elegant read. The gradual collapse and ruin of the Flyte family, and Charles' stolid agnosticism, appear to also signal the death of romance and religion. One chapter I particularly enjoyed was Charles and Rex's (Julia's fiance) dinner at a restaurant in France. The writing made me want to go out and indulge in fine dining immediately. Not an awful lot happens in the way of narrative, but I generally preferred the first half of the book to the second, which went a bit too deeply into religious conscience. The framing scenes of Ryder as a jaded war captain were bosh.

Rating: 3/5