Twilight? Not yet. Brideshead takes over.

I'm looking, no, staring, at the front page of Twilight by Stephanie Meyer and I just can't do it.  I will. ...just not today.

The problem is I've just finished reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and, perhaps fittingly I'm reluctant to hurry the drifting away of that world from my mind by pushing another story in just yet.

This is the only of Waugh's novels that I have read, but, judging by other of his titles - A handful of Dust, Decline and Fall - there might be an overall theme to his work.  Certainly these two titles would be excellent titles for a review of this novel, which follows the descent out of the heavenly state of youth and into bleak adulthood for its narrator, and also the last years of a wealthy english aristocratic family.  The novel ends with the once grand house empty at the end of world war II, and with the last members of the family unlikely to produce heirs.  The glory of the twenties, both at Oxford, and in the lives of the privileged, so enchantlingly portrayed when the story begins, has drifted away like a handful of dust.

Charles Ryder, who narrates the story looking back from the point of view of a lonely middle-aged army captain at the end of the war, befriends the flamboyant Sebastian Flyte in their first year at Oxford in 1920 after Sebastian, passing by drunk, vomits into his window.  For the next two years Ryder, Flyte, and Aloysius - Flyte's teddybear - are inseparable.  Sebastian, the spoiled second son of a well-to-do aristocratic and catholic family, takes Charles home to meet his old nanny, taking care to avoid his actual family as it seems he is reluctant to involve Charles with them.  That involvement is inevitable however, and as Charles, who for close family has only his hostile and sarcastic father, becomes closer to the rest of the Flytes, Sebastian becomes more distant.  The story, painfully beautiful, gives the impression of an ancient edifice, with time, like a chill wind, blowing through it.

It's been three days since I began this post.  Stephanie Meyer has still not got my attention.  I went  back to read the introduction of Brideshead  and, though I'm a bit busier this week, have found myself halfway through it again.  It's completely put me off fantasy for the moment. Why do you need fantasy if a story on earth can be told so well?

Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism.  In part the story portrays the passing of an ancient family line; the end of the age of privilege with hints of the rise of mediocrity.  But as much as that it is about catholicism.  The six members of the Sebastian's family are - for want of a better word - infected with Grace, and each responds differently to its overwhelming presence in their lives.  From the eldest son, Brideshead's complete unquestioning, boring adherence to the tenets; Sebastian and Julias' individual rebellions; to their father's - who converted on his marriage -  complete rejection of it, Grace gets them all in the end one way or another.

The book brought meaning to the oft-quoted "once a catholic, always a catholic".  It echoed exactly the way my catholic sister describes her religion, and also came some way to explaining to me why the couple of catholic girls for whom in my late teens I had such deep but unrequited feelings were not interested even when at the same time they seemed they might be.

I haven't been affected this much by a novel for quite some time.  Most people I know think of the TV series from 1981 when the title is mentioned.  I've not seen it but I might have to now.

If you haven't read it, do.