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The Novel. Brideshead Revisited is a tragicomedy of Britain between World Wars I & II. Like its author's life, it opens with mockery, ends in religious dedication. Half of it glitters with wit, the other half is rigorously solemn. Some of the writing matches Waugh's best (and there is little better); some of it is equal to his worst (sample: ". . . at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. ... On the rough water ... I was made free of her narrow loins."). Those who believe that Author Waugh makes real sense only when he is writing apparent nonsense are likely to be dismayed by the book's religious implications—just as Waugh's more devout co-religionists may be troubled by some of its ripe frivolity.
The hero of Brideshead Revisited is Charles Ryder, an architectural painter. When young Charles became an Oxford undergraduate in the golden age (circa 1921), life still flowed unruffled in Oxford.
Sundays, the old city appeared at its most venerable. "None but churchgoers seemed abroad . . . undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English church-going pace . . . holding, bound in black lambskin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St. Aloysius, St. Mary's, Pusey House. Blackfriars ... all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race. Four proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent: four Indians from the gates of Balliol, in freshly laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers, with snow-white turbans on their heads, and in their plump, brown hands bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw. . . ."
Insane Orderliness. The most arresting figure in this tranquil scene was young Lord Sebastian Flyte. Hero Ryder, who had ground-floor rooms, met Sebastian somewhat unpropitiously one night. Amid the hubbub of strayed revellers he heard one voice say distinctly: "D'you know I feel most unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute." "And there appeared at my window," says Ryder, who narrates the novel in the first person, "the face I knew to be Sebastian's—but not as I had formerly seen it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick. . . . There was ... a kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his extremity, of an open window." The episode ended in the deathless friendship of Sebastian and Ryder, solemnized at a luncheon of plovers' eggs and lobster Newburg.
Ryder's dignified cousin Jasper, who was in his fourth year, was bitter. "I expected you," said he, coldly fixing his eyes on a human skull resting in a bowl of roses, "to make some mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in with some thoroughly objectionable . . . men who ran a mission to hop-pickers in the long vac. But you, my dear Charles . . . have gone straight hook, line and sinker, into the very worst set in the University. . . . There's that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. . . . [He] looks odd to me. ... Of course, they're an odd family."