George Weigel\u2019s writeup in Letters to a Young Catholic<\/i><\/a> that sent me out to Borders looking for Brideshead<\/i>. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, <\/i>it is a \u201cCatholic novel\u201d that I wanted to begin re-reading the moment I had finished the last page. Though I\u2019m lazy enough to wait for the DVDs.<\/p>\nWhat kind of Catholic novel is Brideshead Revisited?<\/i> A very sneaky one. You\u2019re nearly a quarter of the way through it before Waugh offers any details about the religion of the family at the heart of the novel, the Marchmains, whose country seat is known as Brideshead. On page 86 in my edition, the narrator says of his Oxford chum Sebastian Marchmain, \u201cOften, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his Teddy-bear.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Waugh was in any sense evangelizing why did he ever pick such an unorthodox family as Catholic exemplars? Sebastian\u2014a confirmed drunk who carries a stuffed animal around Oxford with him\u2014is not only the most eccentric but, for narrator Charles Ryder, the most compelling of the Marchmains. It is Ryder\u2019s love for Sebastian (love, apparently, in all its forms) that leads him to Brideshead and his encounter with Catholicism. Though he doesn\u2019t realize that this is what he is encountering until almost the very end of the novel\u2014after he has fallen in love with Sebastian\u2019s sister Julia and the two have divorced their respective spouses in order to marry. By this time, Sebastian has died of disease somewhere in Africa, tended by monks who refused him admission as anything other than a menial laborer. His younger sister, Cordelia, who may still end in a convent, reports that Sebastian ended his life somewhere between an alcoholic stupor and spiritual ecstasy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
In the final chapter of the narrative (a prologue and epilogue frame the main story), Lord Marchmain, father of the family, comes home to die. Here\u2014for the three other English-speaking Catholics who have not read Brideshead<\/i>\u2014I will leave off telling the tale and beg you to read it for yourself. The love between Charles and Julia must bow to a greater Love, and there is perhaps a suggestion in the epilogue that, despite a deep skepticism flashed throughout the novel, Charles himself may be on his own winding road to Rome. There are better, deeper surprises.<\/p>\n
I suspect that the majority of those who have loved this novel have not even been Catholics. George Orwell was one of them, calling Waugh \u201cas good a writer as it is possible to be while holding untenable positions.\u201d But for the Catholic minority of readers, few books could be as entertaining, thought-provoking, or pride-inducing. At least that\u2019s how I felt: seriously amused, perplexed, and proud.<\/p>\n
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