Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Note: There are a few spoilers ahead.

The subtitle of Brideshead Revisited, set in England in the 1920’s and 1930’s, is “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.” Ryder is the main character, but the story focuses on his relationship with the Marchmains (especially Sebastian, and later, Julia), an aristocratic family which inhabits Brideshead, a massive, stately home near London.

The story, framed as Ryder’s recollection years later, begins with Ryder’s freshman year at Oxford, where he first meets Sebastian. Sebastian introduces him to the other members of his family, and Charles is intrigued by them. As the narrative continues, Ryder matures in some ways, but he goes through a lot of pain because of his relationship with this family. But I love the book’s ending.

On the surface, this is a tragedy. Ryder is on a quest to find happiness, but he is thwarted twice: first by Sebastian’s depression and alcoholism, and then by Julia’s turn to faith and simultaneous breaking off of their affair.

But this is not a tragedy. In the end, although several lives have been nearly ruined, every one of the wayward main characters—Charles, Sebastian, Julia, and even Lord Marchmain—comes to faith, and finds peace.

This story reminds me that we need to judge a story by its whole, not by its parts. Well-meaning readers can attack this book for its portrayal of immorality, and I can sympathize with them. In fact, both times I’ve read this book, I’ve nearly stopped reading halfway through because it is partly, as its subtitle says, a collection of “profane memories.” And to be honest, it’s not a book I would recommend to everyone.

But Ryder is not designed to be a narrator that we sympathize with. When he portrays his life as an undergraduate at Oxford, he does so to reveal himself as immature and somewhat hedonistic. When he tells us of his life a decade later, as a married man beginning an affair with Julia, he portrays himself as self-centered and cruel to his family, not really knowing his wife or children, or even interested in their lives.

This long path of Ryder's profane memories is there to heighten the power of what happens at the end of the book, even in the last two pages. The story is incredibly well designed. What happens in the end is that against all odds, Charles kneels in a chapel and finds the God he has refused to believe in. I am not a fan of the author’s Roman Catholicism, but I can appreciate this portrayal of Ryder’s redemption.

And it is redemption that is the book’s main theme. In addition to Charles, several other characters come to faith—Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain. As the author weaves Charles’s story with these others’, he portrays each of them as spiritual wrecks through most of the story. The only family members who never waver in the faith are Lady Marchmain, Bridey, and Cordelia. Charles, as an agnostic, pities them. The other Marchmains, Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain, live consciously in sin.

But again, all three of the wayward ones come back to the faith in the end. I think one of the most important passages in the book is one of Cordelia’s comments to Charles:

“The family haven't been very constant [in the faith], have they? There's [Lord Marchmain] gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won't let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read to us the evening Sebastian first got drunk -- I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"

Sebastian is the best example of someone who is caught by this invisible hook. His journey is powerful because it is so sad and so human. On the surface, Sebastian is one of the most tragic characters you could ever come across in literature. At the beginning of the novel, when he first meets Charles, Sebastian is a promising young man. He’s a freshman at Oxford, and he’s got it all. He’s extremely rich, he’s good-looking, and he’s fun to be around. Everyone loves him. But he is who he is, and it’s awful to watch his deterioration into alcoholism. Eventually, he ends up as a wayward drunkard living with a washed out German soldier in northern Africa.

But God never lets go of Sebastian, and in the end, Sebastian is trying, the best he can, to serve God and others, working at a mission community on the edge of civilization. He knows he was created to serve God, and at the end of the book, in spite of all his previous and continued failings, he is serving.

I also love how Julia finds redemption. Like Charles’s, her journey is also tragic—adultery, a miscarriage, divorce—but it becomes beautiful in the end. Part of the satisfaction in the ending is the implication that Charles and Julia, whose relationship has been severed, are at each at peace with God, and therefore with each other.

Lord Marchmain’s journey is also remarkable. In fact, the author could have made this story into four separate books, because Charles, Sebastian, Julia, and Lord Marchmain each have a satisfying journey to faith.

This book is an honest portrayal of what it means to be brought to Christ. It has none of the sentimentalism of Christian bookstore fiction. This book convincingly portrays pain. At one point, Cordelia makes a comment that all true holiness involves suffering. The book shows that it is suffering that brings us to our knees and really opens us to change. Through the tragedies that characters must go through, Waugh shows that truly following Christ is hard, and it can mess up your own plans for your life. Sometimes choosing to follow Christ can be sad, dark, lonely, and difficult. Sometimes following our conscience will cost us something—even what seems to be our deepest joys.

But the story ends with grace, and that grace is so bright that it’s worth the dark journey to find it.

This book is a good model for Christian writers, who sometimes preach in their stories instead of letting the story speak for itself. This book is not preachy, and because it's not, its portrayal of the reality of sin and the grace of God is even more powerful.


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