By that time, a more mature Ryder had become an establishment figure, a well-known but superficial artist specializing in painting old architecture. This ambivalence becomes most clear in the recall of his final days with the family at Brideshead. Much like Scott Fitzgerald's narrator/observer of great wealth (and at about the same time too) in The Great Gatsby. As the character that was Ryder two decades ago falls under Sebastian's wayward influence and later into the family drama, Ryder the narrator seems both enchanted by those golden days and despairing of them. Ryder's voice is also wonderfully nuanced. At the back of our minds, we know a great reckoning is coming. It gives us licence to enjoy the young men's escapades and their oh-so-witty and ironical dialogue. This deliberate positioning of the story before the war-seen from the war-is a kind of a signal to the reader that the author, like his narrator, is aware of the shallowness of much that transpires. It's hard not to be as Sebastian's family enmeshes everything and everyone it comes in contact with. Ryder is jolted into recalling his time with Sebastian and later with the boy's relatives. Charles Ryder is an army officer whose soldiers are billeted in the now deserted Brideshead. His first clever move is to deliver the story from the perspective of the Second World War. And we remain attached as the novel delves into the background of one of them, Sebastian, to uncover the even more alien world of the lordly Marchmains and their family castle, Brideshead. The novel quickly gathers us into friendship and sympathy with the spoiled, dissolute students we would normally find without redeeming value. Why do we care? In part because Evelyn Waugh is such a clever writer. Hardly the stuff of popular fiction that most of us could identify with now. Presented nostalgically and somewhat ornately. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely Catholic, intensely self-absorbed, aristocratic family. Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited?Īn account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonistic pursuits.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh