Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Posted in Literary on Sep 22nd, 2006
reviewed by Rachel Murphy
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green…
—from William Blake’s Songs of Experience
When I first attempted to read Brideshead Revistited, I confess that I put it aside rather quickly. Charles Ryder, from whose perspective the story is told, is not easy to warm up to; his cold, jaded view of the army—of life itself, for he had fallen “out of love” with both—imparts a deadness, like a stale air, to the opening pages. What I did not yet realize is that the reader need not fall in love with Charles to fall in love with the story; and that nothing in the atmosphere is accidental.