Brideshead Revisited

This is really a classic novel in format and may endure to be one. There is formal ornamental language throughout the book to reflect the aristocratic culture of the time. This language is certainly intentional, as is made clearly apparent in the preface. The reader learns about the English aristocracy, their manners, food, furniture, house and the grounds of their estates. The disadvantage of this type of language is that the reader’s mind may drift at times. Sometimes this requires rereading some of the paragraphs, especially in the middle section of the book.The plot is set in a changing world in Britain and America prior to and during World War II. The PBS series, Brideshead Revisited, aired in the 1980s, and is available on DVD or download today to supplement the reading of this novel. The television series helps bring to life the characters and make them solidify in your memory.Captain Charles Ryder and his company of soldiers are to set up headquarters at a large estate. Charles recognizes the mansion as Brideshead. The memories of his connection to Brideshead in his youth are awakened.He was a young artist when he met Lord Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in 1923. Sebastian was very rich and bored. He wanted fun, lightness, silliness; he wanted entertainment to fill the emptiness within. He carried Aloysius, his toy teddy bear everywhere. Charles was infatuated with him. Sebastian was irresponsible but his family bailed him out. His family took steps to oversee his activities and hired Mr. Samgrass to keep an eye on him. Sebastian’s family, especially Lady Marchmain Flyte, his mother, pulled Charles into intimacy in order to control Sebastian. She succeeded in making Charles open up to her, but her attempts to convert Charles to Catholicism failed. Sebastian wanted to get away from his family; he felt trapped. He was less and less in love with Charles as Charles become close to his mother.Sebastian drank more and more. His family, especially his mother, tried to control this, but Sebastian only drank more heavily. Charles wanted to please Sebastian and win his approval, so he gave him money when he asked for it. Sebastian’s mother coldly asked Charles to leave Brideshead when she found he had given Sebastian money for drinking.Charles had had enough and distanced himself from Brideshead, although he still pined for Sebastian. He married Celia, a pretty woman, who took pride in his success as a painter and worked hard to promote him. Charles was attracted to her initially but did not love her. After returning from a 2-year trip to Central America where he had gone to renew his artistic inspiration, Charles showed indifference to his wife and children. When he and Celia were on a ship on vacation, he saw Julia, Sebastian’s sister. He was attracted to her because she reminded him of Sebastian.Julia and Charles both got divorced so they could get married. However, as her father lay dying and Charles did not see the purpose of a priest giving her unconscious father, Lord Marchmain, the “last rites”, she realized that she could not marry Charles and give up her religion.The author says the book is about faith in God, the Brideshead family vs Charles, who is a nonbeliever. The book is about “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”. The book seems to be more than that to me. It is about the choices we make, the paths we take in love and faithfulness.

Having been born in 1961, as a child I witnessed network news stories of Vietnam War protests, conscientious objectors defending their beliefs at home, and draft dodgers fleeing to Canada. Television was for my generation the technology of the day, as the pocket computers we call iPhones and Androids are for Millennials. I recall my parents pondering my fate should the war last until I was old enough to fight: they'd decide for me, they agreed, they'd send me to Canada, where I'd stay with French Canadian relatives. Although evasion might be a justified response to conscription in an unjust war, I couldn't deny that fleeing the country and abandoning those who answered the call to duty felt wrong. Nonetheless, as a conscientious objector, chances were I'd be denied deferment, taught to kill, and shipped overseas where should I refuse to kill I might be killed or should I escape either fate--becomeing a killer or being killed--I might be court-martialed.History spared me that dilemna. Even had the war lasted until I was old enough to fight, I wouldn't have been drafted. On January 27, 1973, two weeks before my twelfth birthday, President Nixon hoping to lessen opposition to the war by stopping conscription, ended the draft. Although after President Jimmy Carter reinstituted it in July 1980, I registered at the age of nineteen, by the time the next conflict, the Gulf War, began in 1990, I was twenty-nine years old, three years past the age eligible to be drafted.During the Vietnam War, I recall, reading in newspaper pages obituaries of the conflict's casualties, local boys not much older than me. we all grieved for them and their families.In Brideshead Revisited, the great War that would come to be known as World War I claimed the lives of Charles's mother who served with the Red Cross and died on the Serbian front. The carnage claimed three of Sebastian's uncles "between Mons and Passchendaele."Like me, Charles and Sebastian were too young to fight. Unlike me, they and specially Sebastian regret being denied a chance to prove themselves on the battlefield. How has that denial influenced Sebastians excessive drinking?

雑誌『考える人』（５月号）の小欄で武藤康史がこの朗読のカセット版を愛聴しているということを知り、気になっていた。それ以来カセット版を購入しようかどうか迷っていたが、ここでタイミングよくＣＤ版が発売された。天にも昇る心地である。これはもちろんunabridged版で、ＣＤは１０枚組、収録時間は１１時間２１分となっている。ＣＤ１枚あたり４００円と考えるとお買い得である。大げさだが、英文学をかじった経験があり、イギリス英語に憧れを感じており、ジェレミー・アイアンズのファンであり、原書を読破したいと思っている私にはもうこれ以上の商品はない。特に原書の英語はかなり難解でこれまで何度もチャレンジしたが、冒頭の「プロローグ」でいつも挫折していた。今度こそはこの朗読版の助けをかりて全編読破に挑戦してみたい。さて、購入したばかりでまだ全てを聞いてはいないが、前半部を聞いただけでも、ジェレミー・アイアンズの朗読がいかにすばらしいものかがわかる。読むだけではわからなかった雰囲気みたいなものをうまく表現しているところはさすがである。例えば、「プロローグ」の後半、主人公のチャールズ・ライダーがブライズヘッドという地名を思い出す短い回想シーンは感動的である。その名文をここに引用する。He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.ジェレミー・アイアンズはこの一節をゆっくりと静かに読み上げる。私はこの部分だけでも十分に元を取ったと感じたのである。武藤氏に感謝したい。

イヴリンウォーが２０世紀を代表するイギリスの小説家の一人だということはwikiなどを読んで知っていた。軍隊に入り、ブライズヘッド邸に近いところに来たところから小説は始まる。そのあと、回想として、大学時代、大学をやめたあとの事、その後、絵描きになった頃のことなどが語られる。語り手のブライズヘッド邸に住んでいた家族とのつながりの物語となっている。残念なことに、友人の妹とは最後に喧嘩をしてしまい、それがもとで飽きられてしまって婚約解消になってしまう。それを引きずっているせいか、軍隊でこの邸宅に２０年ぶりにやってきたときには、その家の礼拝所に行ってお祈りをする。ウォーはカソリックの小説家だからという理由で、語り手はカトリックに改宗してしまっていたとか、友人の父親もカソリックの信仰を最後に持ったとか、後世の人たちの中には解釈している人もいるようだが、単純に、こんなことがあったんですよということを語っているだけの小説におもえた。きれいな英文の小説だ。この小説にはモデルがあり、 Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead がそれについて書いているようだ。また、 Charles Ryder's School Days and Other Stories はBridesheadのスピンオフ作品のようだ。 Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of BridesheadCharles Ryder's School Days and Other Stories

This Penguin Modern Classics edition of Brideshead has a good clear typeface and a good-sized font, so its 452 pages are easy on the eye."I started reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited today. He writes so well that it seems a pity that he hasn't got something better to write about." Thus wrote Duff Cooper in his diary for August 1945. I agree.Although the book contains some brilliant passages (Anthony Blanche is particularly delicious) at least half a dozen of Waugh's novels are more entertaining. For outrageous laugh-out-loud satire Scoop and Decline and Fall are very good. (If you are looking for an "Oxford novel" Decline and Fall ticks the box.) Vile Bodies contains numerous amusing vignettes, but is not as coherent as Scoop and Decline and Fall. (Black Mischief is in my opinion not very good because Waugh is at his best when satirising his own people.) A Handful of Dust is very dark, but sustains dramatic tension much better than Brideshead. Finally, the trilogy of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender is a brilliant portrayal of the Second World War from a British perspective. I would not bother with Brideshead unless you have time to read everything Waugh wrote.

the closest thing prose can come to poetry. like drowning in honey it is so beautifully written. read and re-read countless times, and every reading takes you through that hidden door to the secret garden. lifts the spirits in a world increasingly devoid of beauty.

Our narrator, a non-Catholic officer based on the home front in World War II Britain, revisits a mansion he first visited as a young man and reflects back on his close relationship with a Catholic family. A non-Catholic himself, he reports to us about their habits and customs almost as if he were an anthropologist visiting a tribe in the tropical rainforest. Not only are Catholics a minority in Britain, but the Anglican Church is the official state-sponsored religion.It's a great book and, of course, it's been made into a Masterpiece Theater series years ago. There are many reviews of this work already, so just to illustrate the excellent writing, I will just say that I think the romantic episode on an ocean liner during a storm at sea (her husband is absent; his wife is laid up with seasickness) is the most romantic passage I can think of in literature.