Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1944.  The novel, subtitled “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” seems to be about the wealthy and colorful Marchmain family.  However, as the subtitle suggests, it is as much about the narrator’s passions and desires. While Charles casts himself as an impartial observer of his friend, Sebastian Flyte, and their family, his own desires make the book an intriguing read.

The novel begins at the end.  Charles, an army captain in World War II, is stationed in England.  His unit is transferred to Brideshead, an ornate and lavish country home.  Another officer describes the house and sums it up, “you never saw such a thing.”  Charles says that he has. The officer replies:

“Oh well, you know all about it.  I’ll go and get cleaned up.”

I’d been there before; I knew all about it.

With that, we are sent back some twenty years to Oxford where Charles, an upper middle class student meets Sebastian quite by accident. However, the two become close friends.  During the summer break, Sebastian suffers a minor accident and sends for Charles.  Mostly left alone, the two share a golden summer that Charles wants to fix in his mind:

It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel-chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate to eat the Muscat grapes and choose choice orchids for our buttonholes.

The first two-thirds of the novel focus on the friendship between Sebastian and Charles.  Charles, unhappy with his dull father and searching for his life’s purpose, wants to embrace the Marchmain family, including Sebastian’s beautiful sister, Julia.  However, he can never quite penetrate their inner circle, partly because of the family’s Catholicism.  Sebastian too starts distancing himself from Charles, sinking into an alcoholic stupor.  In the final section of the novel, Charles reunites with Julia, in a complicated affair.

While the novel does not follow a traditional love plot, desire is certainly the central theme.  As the subtitle suggests, there is tension between the sacred and the profane. At first glance, it seems to be the tension between the Marchmain’s Catholic faith and Charles’s atheism. However, I came to think the tension is more between the Marchmain’s wealth, as embodied in the house, and Charles’s desire to posses that wealth. Charles earns his living painting mansions; his paintings of Brideshead launch his career.  Since Charles is the narrator, and quite a sophisticated one at that, he will never directly admit his passion for the house.  However, throughout the novel, his most passionate descriptions are of the architecture of the home, not really of the people who live there.  What makes the novel fun to read is sorting out what Charles really wants beneath what he claims to want.