‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’
A famous television series from 1981. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. Teddy bears. Long visits to Venice to meet Laurence Olivier. Oxford undergraduates drinking heavily and speaking through megaphones. These are just a few of the images that have haunted me over the years, stopping me in my tracks every time I thought about reading Brideshead Revisited. But I decided it was time to take the plunge, and although I had many flashbacks when I was reading the novel I just held on tight until they passed. My edition is the 1957 Penguin; it’s been in my possession for as long as I can remember. I’ve moved house eight times in the last 15 or so years and this is one of those books that has always travelled with me.
An army captain is billetted to an old house during the Second World War. He’s been there before, and it evokes memories of his past; Oxford in the early 1920s, where Charles Ryder befriends the effete, charismatic and extrovert Sebastian Flyte. They quickly develop an intense and often disturbingly insular friendship; whilst their relationship is never revealed to be a homosexual one, they prefer their own company to others and are indifferent to the charms of women. Although both from the priviliged upper classes, both also come from dysfunctional families; Charles’ closest relative is his eccentric and slightly mad father, Sebastian’s own father lives in apparent exile overseas after leaving his mother. They begin to drift apart when Sebastian himself drifts into hopeless alcoholism; neither Charles or his own family are able to help him. Ten years later Charles, now a successful artist, embarks on a doomed love affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia.
Although he’s perhaps not someone you’d want to be associated with in real life, the star of Brideshead Revisited is definitely Sebastian. He’s the friend from hell; you begin to despise them and their actions of self destruction but you still try, and fail, to save them. He irritated and infuriated me, but the parts of the book where he wasn’t around were just dull. And the teddy bear, which was a suitable affectation for the fashion conscious of the early 80s, is one of just many keys to the personality of a doomed individual. And putting the homosexual debate to one side, Sebastian, as Charles’ first love, represents the first love for all of us – the one we can never forget even if we might want to (even if it means settling for the sister).
I’ve heard reports that the new cinema version, due for release in 2008, will concentrate mainly on Charles and Julia’s relationship. Something that won’t capture the imagination, or haunt the memory, nearly as much. Why? I found them unappealing characters, and the novel sagged without Sebastian’s disturbing exploits. Unfortunately Brideshead Revisited is ultimately a depressing read. The scenes with Charles’ father are hilarious but the comedy in this novel is minimal. There’s always the sense that life will be a disappointment, even before it’s really got going, with things lost never to be retrieved again:
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Crocks of gold? I think in Waugh’s mind, if memories of youth are rekindled they invariably only serve to cause feelings of sadness or regret. Depressive that I am, I tend to agree with him.
Where I Don't Read
Thursday May 10, 2007
in books | meme
Following last week’s Reading in Public, a follow up meme from Booking Through Thursday. Where don’t you read?
Although I try to squeeze in a chapter or two at lunchtimes, I don’t read at work. Well, I do in a way, but it’s all work related, which tends to take the pleasure out of it. As I manage a website, I can get away with looking at forums and blogs and internet magazines in the name of research although there’s only a limit that my conscience will allow.
My daily commute to work lasts for an hour each way and because it’s by car I lose a lot of valuable reading time. I miss squeezing onto the underground with my paperback when I lived in London, which is something I never thought I’d say. I’m stuck instead with UK radio, which can rot the soul. I know, I should try audio books.
As I said before, I try not to read where I think it might offend others. Mainly family gatherings, or visits to places where I am meant to be doing something, such as water parks, which – inexplicably – I always find myself in. I’ve cunningly found a way around these situations. If you pack a book with your flask and sandwiches for the family picnic, or slip one in with your swimming costume and towel, you need only produce it momentarily when others are looking. Then there’s always the possiblility of striking up a book-related conversation if someone like-minded is passing round the paper plates, or standing behind you in the queue for the water rapids.
Talking of water, I never read in the bath as I can’t bear wrinkly pages, and logistics prevent me from reading whilst sleeping (although I’ve tried, and often wake up in the morning with an open book sprawled over me). Otherwise, I will try my best to read when and where I can.
They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most.
According to Harold Bloom, the four major American novelists of the current era are Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. After recently reading and enjoying McCarthy for the first time I decided to move onto Roth’s latest. Interestingly, both authors were born in 1933 and, although The Road and Everyman are vastly different, I did find them exploring similar themes, or at least provoking me to consider certain, very big, subjects.
Philip Roth’s Everyman is about death, illness, regret and dying, but strangely it isn’t really a depressing read. The novel begins with an unnamed man’s funeral before backtracking over the events of his life. It’s intelligently written and moving, and Roth manages to delve into the complex life of an individual in such a comparitavely short book. The novel moves back and forth rapidly through time but there’s meaning in Roth’s meanderings. His subject’s memories tend to spark other memories, many of them being linked by periods spent in hospital, either as a small child with a hernia, or visiting others – dying parents and friends. Roth also conjours up a vivid image of a Jewish family and their New York jewellery shop in the 1940s, bringing the past alive, while at the same time delivering an elegy to a spent life.
Roth’s Everyman isn’t a particularly likeable character. I read him as arrogant, and I wamed to him less during the scene where, as an old man, he attempts and fails to pick up a young girl jogging in the park. There’s also sections of the book describing his particular sexual preferences that I’d much sooner have remained unaware of. He’s failed at marriage three times, two of his three children dislike him. He grows old, grows ill and faces death. Why should I feel sorry for him? As a reader it was entirely my choice; the dying man seeks redemption and he’s in the hands of the reader. His plight becomes compelling; I didn’t like him but I did care for him. And I forgave him.
There’s much to admire in Everyman because it is such a skilfully written novel. The closing pages were the most effective for me, where the man visits the family graveyard and strikes up a conversation, Hamlet – style, with the resident gravedigger. It’s poetic and elegant writing at its best, and where a lesser writer could fail dismally (sinking too far into Shakespearean pastiche) Roth handles it with real art.
Everyman is a concise and brilliantly written book by a writer who, although now in his mid seventies, is – and here comes the cliché – working at the height of his powers. It’s a meditation on life and its end that I would imagine -and hope – Ian McEwan will also be delivering twenty years from now. Until then, Everyman is one of the best ruminations on death that I’ve ever read, and features an admirable homage to Hamlet. And do I agree with Harold Bloom? Two of the best novels I’ve read this year are by McCarthy and Roth so, partly, yes, although this jury is still out on Pynchon…
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