[At 22%:]
Me: Self, this is tedious.What on earth is going on?
Self: Sebastian is beautiful but quite mad. Charles Ryder is a doormat. They most certainly enjoy drinking a pint or two. It seems to me that it is a tale of party-hopping, upper-class Oxford men who cannot be bothered to do mundane stuff like studying, for example.
Me: Delightful summary there, Self. Do you think something interesting is about to happen?
Self: Certainly! They will be going to Brideshead Castle soon. I think skeletons will start tumbling out of the cupboard as soon as they set foot in that stately manor because Sebastian loathes his family members and there was a line about his “murky background” at 15%.
[At 37%:]
Me: Self, his family members do not seem like the Devil’s spawn. They may be a bit self-centered but surely they are not going to poison Sebastian’s soup at the dinner table. We are not reading We Have Always Lived in The Castle, you know.
Self: I wish we were.
[After a few hours]
Me: Self, what’s “quattrocento loveliness”?
It is a pretentious book for pretentious people; nothing more, nothing less. I fail to understand why it is so popular. What was the author driving at? If it’s a book whose primary purpose is to make one feel nostalgic about bygone eras, then I suppose one has to be of aristocratic English stock to experience the said nostalgia.
Ryder and Sebastian – the main characters – go from one party to another and get outrageously drunk. That seemed to be their chief occupation while at Oxford. Is one supposed to chuckle and shake one’s head at their foolish misdeeds and say “boys will be boys”? Lady Marchmain, the long-suffering mother, is hated by almost everyone in the family but I don’t see why. Lord Marchmain has a mistress and he speaks of her as if it’s of no great consequence. The reader ought to be scandalized! But isn’t. Julia, the sister, is careless and flighty. Sebastian was not amusing at all. I couldn’t care less if all of them (including Charles Ryder) jumped into a lake and got drowned. Ryder seems to be the worst of them all. He hardly has any passions and does watever Sebastian asks him to do. What a biddable young fellow. Even in later life, he simply does immoral things, without any remorse or any guilt whatsoever. Rephrasing Julia, I ask: why must he be such a bore?
The author’s writing style is most extraordinary. He deliberately leaves things unsaid, and when he chooses to say them, he says in the most singular manner. It’s almost as though the reader is an outsider in Brideshead Castle and can never be sophisticated enough to understand the wonderful, nuanced characters the author has taken so much pain to create. Observe, for instance, how the author uses an analogy to describe his first night with Julia.
“It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.”
A freeholder and his property, indeed. How prosaic. Yet some might say that was an elegant way of describing the act.
So, there you have it – a book with silly characters and a non-existent plot, that is more often than not recommeded to unsuspecting fans of P.G. Wodehouse and H. H. Munro. I wouldn’t dream of recommending this book to anyone.
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