I've just finished reading Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited.  It's  one of those books I'd always been curious about, and at a neighborhood booksale last fall I came across a nice, cheap copy of what I think is the first American edition (no dustjacket, alack).

   I'm not sure what I was expecting.  Even for this confirmed Anglophile (cf. The Kinks), the first half was fairly alienating:  I felt as if I were reading a work for which I was not the intended audience.  Things warmed up in the second half, especially after Julia replaced her brother Sebastian as the narrator's chief obsession.  Even then, though, I remained on the outside, looking in. 

   In part, this was a matter of class politics.  Waugh depicts from the inside the same world of British aristocrats cozying up to fascism that Ishiguro captured brilliantly in Remains of the Day, and it is perhaps the lack of an ironic distance here (despite the narrator's avowed sense of distance from the Marchmain clan) that paradoxically made it hard for me to get close to the characters.   Really, what are we to make of Cordelia, the spunky youngest Marchmain daughter who goes off to serve as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War--on General Franco's side?   Or of upper class toffs who rush back to London to help break the General Strike of 1926?  Uhm, these are not my people....  And I'm a big P.G. Wodehouse fan.

   The double-fake tactic that structures the portrayal of religion likewise left me unmoved.  The novel holds belief at arm's length--but only to reaffirm its power.  The narrator is strongly suspicious of the Roman Catholic church and cannot understand the hold it has on the Marchmain family.  In the end, though, his agnostic stance is undercut by story events, and he learns the limits of his understanding of the world of Julia and Sebastian and perhaps even reconciles himself to a kind of faith.  I couldn't make the leap required to follow him down that path, though.   

   The best bits in the novel revolve around architecture and the realization that buildings outlive their usefulness--or, more precisely, have to be reinvented to serve our constantly changing needs.  The narrator is a painter who specializes in capturing historic mansions just before they are pulled down, and it is the grand old Brideshead estate that anchors the work, from beginning to end.  Oddly enough, I found it easier to project myself into the rooms, the buildings, and the landscaped grounds then into the lives of the characters who peopled them.    That makes me, of course, just another tourist.  And no one wants to be a tourist.