Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn WaughMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Every sentence is festooned with snobbery and every deeply-flawed character is an appliance for the author's main task. (I just loved this!)
Years ago, I saw the Brideshead Revisited PBS series with Jeremy Irons (as Charles Ryder). So, I was actually very surprised, throughout my reading, by this most obvious theme - Catholicism. Every character undergoes some kind of a religious awakening and conversion. It is woven into every major occurrence - it is a repeating chorus.
However, it is the bombast, the hauteur - all wrapped beautifully in such ornamental language - that kept me reading with joy for many hours.
A quote which has stuck with me: He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
A solidly interesting story relayed in the most luxurious language imaginable - two thumbs up!
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