William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Some years later, Charles — now a successful artist — meets Sebastian’s sister Julia again while on a transatlantic liner. They soon become lovers and plan to marry. This course of action is impeded because they both have to divorce their respective partners and also because of the return to England of Julia’s father Lord Marchmain. Lord Marchmain had scandalized society by openly taking a mistress and had abandoned his wife, family and religion to live abroad in self-imposed exile. He returns home to die, still a resolute apostate. The climax of the novel is a death-bed scene where, at the very last moment, Lord Marchmain acknowledges his faith. This gesture compels Julia to remain true to hers also, and she refuses to live with or marry Charles — even though Lord Marchmain had altered his will to leave Brideshead to them both. Charles accepts her decision and they part for ever.

The novel’s epilogue sees Charles wandering through the deserted and decrepit Brideshead contemplating the past. He is a sad and melancholy man but the experience has provided him with a faith of his own and, it’s strongly implied, he has converted to Catholicism.

The novel, Waugh said in a letter to Nancy Mitford, “is all about God.” This is only part of the truth. The events in Waugh’s life which made an appearance in his fiction were treated with an unremitting honesty, as Gilbert Pinfold makes abundantly clear. This is also true of the theme of betrayal and the faithless wife in A Handful of Dust, and his experience of war in the excellent and often underrated Sword of Honour. Brideshead belongs to this line of Waugh’s fiction but it’s the one book where the area of personal revelation and exploration is obscured by the unsatisfactory “story” surrounding it. The lingering over meals and wine, the implausible destinies of most of the characters, the meandering sprawl of the narrative are distractions and obfuscations. Beneath this Waugh’s real intentions can with some effort be made out. To put it crudely, Brideshead Revisited is not, as he would have it, about “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely related characters”; it’s about, first, the nature of a love that can exist between two young men and, second, the particular character of Waugh’s own religious faith.

The first part of Brideshead Revisited is an evocation of Oxford in the twenties and of a class of friendship which would now be recognized as homosexual. Waugh clouds the issue but the homosexual references are so numerous that only a wilful stubbornness could ignore their implication. When Charles’s relationship with Sebastian ends, the love interest is sustained in the person of Julia. However, although her similarity to Sebastian is continually stressed, the description of Charles’s love affair with her is almost wholly lifeless. It’s the character of Sebastian which attracts our interest, but his exit from the novel is clumsily abrupt and his ultimate fate — as a tame drunk in a monastery somewhere — is a feeble stab at plausibility.

After the Sebastian-Charles relationship the second theme of the novel engages Waugh’s remaining serious attention. As the family prepares for Lord Marchmain’s death, Charles systematically attacks, with devastating rationality, the tenets of the Catholic faith. To the agnostic or atheist reader — perhaps to the non-Catholic reader — everything about the book’s conclusion is maddeningly unsatisfying. And Waugh encourages this reaction with grim perversity. The reader is cajoled into condemning the Flyte family’s destructive faith. We cannot understand and must deplore Lord Marchmain’s death-bed recantation. We find it impossible to comprehend the reasons why Julia rejects Charles and we earnestly hope Charles will curse her for an ignorant fool. Finally, it becomes inconceivable that — at the novel’s end — Charles too should adopt their faith. But Waugh has no wish to provide a comforting or remotely rational explanation for his faith. It does not partake of reason or logic. Its sustaining power would be of no account if it did. It functions, for him at least, as the most severe and uncompromising of challenges, and it’s this aspect that Waugh so ruthlessly illustrates in the final pages.

This disharmony between the two themes of the novel and much of the narrative which is meant to reveal them may be one way of explaining the many dissatisfactions arising from this curious novel. Essentially it comes down to this: Waugh fudges the issue on the first theme and takes up the second halfway through the book, encumbered by having to work through a narrative in which he has only a superficial interest.

A television adaptation, I surmised, might seize the opportunity of focusing the emphasis on these subtextual obsessions. To a very limited extent this has been attempted.

I’ve seen the first five episodes — six hours — of Granada’s forthcoming adaptation of the novel. It is scrupulously faithful to the original. John Mortimer’s script uses Waugh’s own dialogue and vocabulary at every opportunity. Even the “feel” of the novel has been maintained through the extensive use of voiceover narration.

These episodes cover the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and take in their Oxford careers, a visit to Lord Marchmain in Venice, and several holidays at Brideshead. One of the defects of the novel, and where television actually improves on the original, is in the character of Charles. In the book his personality is — frankly — dull and boring. It’s hard to imagine why someone as intriguing as Sebastian should want to have anything to do with him. On film we have Jeremy Irons as Charles, fleshing out the “I” figure admirably. At least we can see why Sebastian and the preening aesthete Anthony Blanche (excellently rendered by Nicholas Grace) should be fascinated: simply he’s good-looking and they clearly fancy him. This implication is more heavily emphasized than in the novel but doesn’t move much beyond this. Sebastian puts his arms round Charles’s shoulders but otherwise their affection remains chaste. (Mortimer does get Charles on some occasions to light his cigarette from Sebastian’s. A code?)

This policy decision to follow the book at all costs is commendable (it extends to set decorations, costumes, even — with one important exception — hairstyles) though I should imagine it’s going to be progressively hard to maintain in the second half. However, it does mean that the faults of the book are carried over to the film. Certain explanations are not forthcoming — notably in the case of Sebastian’s self-loathing and his mysterious shame “of being unhappy.” A charge of tedium is sure to be levelled, as it can be at the book. A lot more could have been cut with little damage, and, as it is, it’s going to have to be spread fairly thin to cover twelve hours of viewing time.

There is one slip-up, though, which seems, in the midst of so much attention to detail, curious. In the novel both Sebastian and Julia are dark. Their extreme likeness to one another is regularly referred to — a fact which is intended to make Julia an obvious Sebastian surrogate. But in the series Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) is blond and Julia (Diana Quick) is dark. Why, I wonder. It seems a stupid oversight.

Otherwise one can only applaud. The acting is of a uniformly high standard. Anthony Andrews gives the performance of his life as Sebastian, the locations — Oxford, Venice, Castle Howard — are superb, and there’s a classic John Gielgud cameo as Charles’s eccentric father. The first episode is being shown on Monday 12 October. Despite all the problems, well worth watching.

1981